This is one in a series of posts reviewing and looking at how some of the SEO companies which use bulk emails/spam with ‘we can help your terrible site’ type emails really can (and actually mostly can’t!) help your site.
Read some simple explanations of some of the SEO terms used on this post…
This time the email came in from a Christopher who was using an @digitalbizland.com email address.
The email came into my business account although it was for my Christmas site (this is because my business address is on the WHOIS for that domain). I also had an identical email come through at the same time – but for my Easter site. So that in itself tells you that anything in the spam is that – spam – and so not to be trusted!
The subject of the spam was “improve traffic for whychristmas.com” and went:
Hello whychristmas.com Team,
Hope you are doing good.
Love your website and content. I’m sure you get, tons of SEO cold emails, so instead of sending a bunch of bullet points I’d love to send 2 specific ideas:
I see you’re using old school link building process – which a lot of cheap firms recommend and this kills your search engine rank and traffic in the long term. The solution is targeted content posts with proper manual optimization – we’ve had clients go from page ten to page one on google with proper optimization.
Your website still uses ipv4. Whereas, it’s time for ipv6. It’s better instead to naturally put keywords into your blog posts and content marketing.
I strongly believe, our marketing campaign (Organic and paid) can help you to improve high visibility in organic search results and boost in conversion rate.
That’s a lot of calls You’re missing out.
If you are interested please reply to this email and I will send you the next step with details proposal.
Have a Great Day.
Thanks & Regards,
Christopher [name removed for privacy, although I’m 99% sure it’s fake!] | (Analyst)Disclaimer: If Interested we will send more details on our “corporate identity”, “company profile”, “Pricelist” etc. in our next response. Newsletter, If Not, You can simply reply with “remove” and we will delete your email from our list. “The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003”.
A fairly standard SEO spam template. Including the ‘disclaimer’ at the end, which isn’t worth the paper it’s not printed on…
Anyway, I replied asking what was wrong with my site:
Hi,
This is interesting. Please tell me more. Is there anything else wrong with my site?
Thanks
After a week of not getting a reply, I replied to it again, from my Christmas site’s email. It’s now been nearly a month and I’ve still heard NOTHING back from them…
I’ll post an update if I ever do get a reply (I doubt one will ever arrive).
Their Report & Recommendations
I’ve had MANY spam emails from @digitalbizland.com addresses – so the line “I’m sure you get, tons of SEO cold emails” in the spam template is rather amusing…
I’ve also replied to many @digitalbizland.com as well – but I’ve NEVER had a reply from them. So, in the past I’ve not ‘reviewed’ them. The domain just used to go to holding page. But now it forwards to an SEO company – so we know who’s behind them and I can review – aha!
Let’s look at what they said on their spam template about ‘my site’ (well every site they ever spam as it’s clearly a template)…
Point 1 – “I see you’re using old school link building process…” No. I’m not. I don’t actually use any sort of ‘link building process’ for my Christmas site. It’s been around for over 20 years and has picked up links along the way. I basically let the links take care of themselves. There’s also no real way they could ever know what my link strategy is (apart from if it was doing something very clearly dodgy). This whole para is just along the lines of “you’re doing it wrong – only we can do it right – give us money…”!
Point 2 – “Your website still uses ipv4. Whereas, it’s time for ipv6.” Well, this is more rubbish and of course there’s no explanation as to what any of it means… So let me briefly explain:
IP addresses are how computers (and other things) on the internet know each other (a bit like phone numbers). SAI SEO & Web Solutions are also implying that IPv4 is now ‘bad’ for SEO. But it makes NO DIFFERENCE.
Rather than me explaining all about IP addresses and SEO go and have a read about it in this article from a hosting company: https://www.hostarmada.com/blog/does-ip-address-affect-seo-and-google-rankings/ (they do plug some of their own services on there, and I have no experience of using them, but the article is full of good and useful information).
My site is also IPv4 AND IPv6 friendly (see https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ipv6/health-check?domain=whychristmas.com) – so the “Your website still uses ipv4” is complete and utter rubbish. (Most hosting companies these days are sorting out the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and it’s really nothing you need to worry about.)
What’s even more odd is that the rest of ‘point 2’ is: “It’s better instead to naturally put keywords into your blog posts and content marketing.” That’s actually decent advice. However, IT IS NOTHING TO DO WITH IP ADDRESSES!!!
So both of the points in their spam template are very wrong about my site – and would be wrong about many others they spam.
Looking at Their Site
With SEO spammers, I also like to look at their sites, to see if they practice what they preach (I mean would you trust a plumber who had leaking and rusty pipes all over their own house?!); and also to compare their site with a site they say they can help…
Their site that the digitalbizland.com domain forwards to is https://www.sai-seoservices.com/
For HTML Validation, my Christmas site has no errors. Their site has 4 errors and 18 warnings. That’s pretty impressive as SEO spammers go!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 8 errors and 9 contrast errors – again, not bad. My Christmas site has no errors of either kind!
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 42
Accessibility: 91
Best Practices: 75
SEO: 100
My site gets:
Performance: 96
Accessibility: 100
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 100
So my site is better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’.
There is a privacy page, but it’s located under an ‘FAQ’ navigation item – not in the site’s footer where basically everyone put links to things like privacy policies! It’s one of the better privacy pages I’ve seen on an SEO spammers site. However, it’s still not good enough to fully comply with GDPR or other major privacy laws…
And remember they put “The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003” at the end of their spam to make it look like they’re not spamming?! Well, the CAN-SPAM act came into effect in 2003, not 2009. Oops. What’s more ‘oops’ is that their spam breaks CAN-SPAM in at least three way (probably more). Hmmmm.
The meta title on the home includes “Best SEO Company USA”. Well, as we’ve seen so far, they are very much NOT the ‘best’ SEO company and I strongly suspect that any connection that SAI SEO & Web Solutions have to the USA is tenuous at best…
The meta description starts “SAI SEO one of the growing SEO Company” – that doesn’t make sense.
There’s page called ‘Our Process’ and on it there’s a bullet point “100% Ethical and White Hat practices followed”. Hmmm; I don’t think spamming people from a different domain with a template that’s full of lies is exactly ‘100% Ethical’…!
They also say they’ll do “W3C Validation” (it’s a shame they’ve not fixed all the errors on their own site then) and Google+ Marketing (which will be tricky as it closed years ago)
Remember they said my site was using IPv4 and not IPv6 (which was wrong because it is…)? Well, I ran their site through the same test! https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ipv6/health-check?domain=sai-seoservices.com They score 3/8 for IPv6 support. My site got 8/8. (They really don’t know what they’re talking about do they?)
In the site’s footer there’s an address in Rhode Island, USA. If you go to the contact page, there’s the RI address again, as ‘location 1’. Looking on a map, this is a normal house in VERY rural RI (certainly not where the Best SEO Company USA would be based!). There’s also ‘location 2’ which is an office block in Bhubaneswar, India – the home to many an SEO spammer (that’s more like it).
There are also two US phone numbers on the site. One covers an area in western Michigan, the other is for Rhode Island. However, due to the low population in Rhode Island, there are lots of ‘spare’ numbers on the RI code and it’s got rather a reputation for being used by scammers and for ‘non local’ people using the numbers…
Doing a quick Google for ‘SAI SEO & Web Solutions’ shows their Google info box. The main address is the one in Bhubaneswar (no mention of Rhode Island at all) – fancy that!
The top result on Google for them is their LinkedIn page. The next is their site. The remaining eight results are all business registration/listings sites.
Six of these are Indian business registration listings, all saying that SAI SEO & Web Solutions was registered in India in 2016 (and the listings use the PLTD Indian business type, not LLC like it would be in the USA).
There Facebook page were both created in September 2014. The Facebook page lists the RI address, their Twitter account says they’re in Bhubaneswar…
The other two sites are US based business listings. These use the RI address. One of these listings says the company was founded in 2008 (which rather seems to differ from their legal registration in India).
On many of the Indian sites, it gives the same two names (appearing to be of south asian origin) as the top mangers/directors for the company. On the US sites, one of these names is also present, along with one ‘western’ name that’s on both US sites and is listed as an ‘Executive’ on one and ‘Non-Management Operations’ on the other. I wonder if this name is real or might even be the person who owns ‘location 1’?! (There’s also another supposed employee listed on one of the US sites called ‘Kevin Seo’, erm, yeah…)
Remember the Google info box? Well that’s got five 5* ‘reviews’ on it. Out of those five, two are from someone with the same (western) name (hmmm). One is by someone with exactly the same name as the main director of the company (hmmm)! Another is by someone with the same family name as the other main director of the company (hmmm). And the last one is by someone who appears to work at another SEO company based in Bhubaneswar – although their site says that they’re in New York (hmmm).
Shall we say that I’m not convinced that much work (if any) happens in ‘location 1’ – or that SAI SEO actually have any real connection to Rhode Island (or anywhere in the USA) at all.
Conclusion
SAI SEO & Web Solutions are SEO spammers.
They send out bulk spam from a different domain – dodgy in itself.
The claims on the spam were very wrong and made claims they couldn’t know about.
They didn’t bother to reply to my emails asking the most basic of questions.
If SAI SEO & Web Solutions spam you, or you get an email from an @digitalbizland.com address, clicking the delete button is probably a good idea.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…