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 Mark who was using an @dmatexas.com email address (that domain doesn’t have a site, it seems only to exist to send out spam). The email came into my business account and was for my business site.
The subject of the spam was “Re: jpc-design.com domain errors” (so using the old ‘put a re at the front to make it look like we’ve had dealings in the past trick’) and went:
Dear Team at jpc-design.com,
Not sure if you knew this but your website jpc-design.com has some problems that you might want to consider looking into. I spent 2-3 minutes looking around and found:
It doesn’t work properly on Mobile Phones, at all (which is how people browse the web these days).
It doesn’t adjust properly when you resize the screen (Google recommends RESPONSIVE Websites rather than ADAPTIVE)
It’s hard to read on larger displays
The design looks really, really dated compared to some of your competitors.
I actually do web design as a living so I figured I’d reach out and let you know there’s serious room for dead easy(and affordable) improvement. If you would like, I can send you some of my previous work samples.
I can develop the website on a more advanced platform at an affordable price. That price also includes making it complete mobile responsive which will support all modern devices including all ranges of screen sizes.
Is that something you’d be interested in?
Thanks & Regards,
Sincere regards,
Mark [name removed for privacy although I’m sure it’s fake] | Business Development Manager
Pulpsys LLP | pulpsys.com
Phone: [removed for privacy]P.S-1: If you want to receive detailed plan of action, please feel free to reply “YES”, We will get back to you with Details.
P.S-2: If you find this email unsolicited, please reply with “REMOVE” in the subject line and we will take care that you don’t receive any further promotional mail.
Well, where to start. It’s all total rubbish (see below for more). I’ve seen more of the “I actually do web design as a living” type quotes on SEO spam lately, I guess they think it makes them sounds more important. To me it just sounds daft. And they put their domain in the footer – but weren’t sending out spam from it. Could it be because they don’t want their main domain associated with spam emails?!
And two PS’s! And I can guarantee that replying REMOVE will do NOTHING!!!
Any, they said to reply YES if you want to get more info – so I did!
That got me the be reply from Mark, this time using at @pulpsys.com email account – hmmmm.
Hello James,
Thank you for the nice reply. Below is the detailed proposal for your website success.
How can we improve your website?-https://jpc-design.com/
All the design factors & layouts need to be implemented in order to have a more appealing & user-experienced website.
Home page can be designed in a modern, dynamic look & feel way with cutting edge features.
Header sections can also be improved.
Quality banners with auto sliding feature to make them more attractive.
To be improved the glossy menu bar with roll over buttons.
Clear navigation to all the pages/products/categories to improve the user experience and make it a search engine friendly one.
To be improved the contact us validation query form AND a spam filter (captcha) to keep away online spammers & internet bots from your website.
Can be installed a google map for your better reach.
Footer sections will be implemented with call to action elements.
XML Site Map for major search engines to index the pages of your website properly.
Fully responsive design to all small screen size outfits like Mobile, I pad, tablets etc with call to action elements.(Mobile friendly)
Cost details:
Based on our estimated efforts, It would cost you around $400 to redesign with a customized look & feel design, cutting edge layout sample, product friendly, mobile compatible in nature, fully responsive design on all screen sized devices like Mobile, I-pad, tablet etc, an adaptive of modern features, and an interactive user interface one.Timeline: The whole thing can be executed within 18-23 business working days.
More questions can be appreciated and I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks & best regards,
Mark Lee| Business development manager
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1(806)-275-9759
Web: www.pulpsys.com
Skype: [email protected]
Company: PulpSys LLC
More rubbish (more on this below!) but there are a couple of other interesting things to notice.
In the first spam, they’re Pulpsys LLP, but now they’re Pulpsys LLC! Both LLP and LLC are types of business registration in many countries around the world, including the USA – but you can’t be both! (Or as I suspect, they’re actually neither as they’re not in the USA…)
The timing of the emails is also interesting. Pulpsys claim to be in Texas. The original spam was sent just after 8am in Dallas – which is just after 6.30pm in Bengaluru, India. Mark’s follow up was sent at 0.40am in Texas, but that would have been just after 11am in Bengaluru. What one of those options sounds more like general office hours to you?!
Anyway, it was time to challenge Mark with a few questions (he did ask):
Hi Mark,
I’ve been a web designer and developer for 20 over years. I like to reply to SEO spammers to see what ‘services’ they offer and the things they say and use to get clients.
Yes, I do have some more questions for you.
Please can you tell me why you think it’s ok to spam people, from random email accounts, to get business?
Are you happy breaching multiple international laws?
Your initial email was IN BREACH OF ALL the pieces of anti-spam legislation listed below (and many others from around the world).
For the UK (where I live) you are not allowed to sent marketing emails to an individual without their permission – you did this: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/ (Under UK law, I am an ‘individual’ as I’m a Sole Trader, not a Ltd Company.)
For the USA (where you site says you’re based), you are breaking several aspects of CAN-SPAM compliance: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
For CASL in Canada, you need consent to send electronic marketing – which you did not have: https://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/00008.html (You also need other business identifiers in the emails, which your emails do not have.)
The Anti Spam Act in Australia has similar conditions for consent and identity, which your emails also do not meet: https://www.acma.gov.au/avoid-sending-spam
In South Africa there is the Protection of Personal Information Act, which says you have to have consent to send people marketing emails, which you did not have: https://ispa.org.za/spam/
In France the The Trust in the Digital Economy Act says that you have to have consent to send marketing emails, which you did not have: https://www.culture.gouv.fr/en/Thematiques/Industries-culturelles-et-creatives/Dossiers-thematiques/Le-spam/Le-cadre-juridique-La-legislation-francaise-en-matiere-de-spam
For The Netherlands, the Dutch Telecommunications Act says that you need consent to send people marketing emails, which you did not have. It also says that the true identity of the party should be disclosed up front, which you did not do. https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/document/nld/1988/telecommunications_act_of_the_netherlands.html?
I look forward to getting your answers to my questions.
It’s been well over a week an I’ve heard nothing back… I’ll post an update if I ever do get a reply (I doubt one will ever arrive).
Their Report & Recommendations
In his initial spam (well spam template, I doubt he’d every visited the site), Mark said my site doesn’t work well on phones and looks dated. My site is actually VERY mobile friendly and I think it looks perfectly nice and modern thank you very much.
We’ll have more of a look at things that Mark said were wrong in his follow up email (which is very obviously a template but I’ll still have some fun with it…)
All the design factors & layouts need to be implemented in order to have a more appealing & user-experienced website.
Well, that’s so general and non-specific that it’s basically meaningless (which is the whole point of using a template with lots of scary looking words on it I guess).
Home page can be designed in a modern, dynamic look & feel way with cutting edge features.
See above. So what are these ‘cutting edge’ features?! The site uses html5, the layout uses flexbox and I’ve got CSS filters when you hover on images. Those are ‘new ish’. Don’t they count?!
Header sections can also be improved.
See above (again). Improved how?!
Quality banners with auto sliding feature to make them more attractive.
No. Just no. See https://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ (The answer is no by the way.)
To be improved the glossy menu bar with roll over buttons.
What?! I don’t have a glossy menu bar. Has Mark even visited my site?
Clear navigation to all the pages/products/categories to improve the user experience and make it a search engine friendly one.
Erm, the navigation consists of four links going to the four pages/sections on the site. What more do you want? And the nav of a site is a pretty minor part of SEO… (It’s important in usability/accessibility, but that’s not what Mark was talking about.)
To be improved the contact us validation query form AND a spam filter (captcha) to keep away online spammers & internet bots from your website.
What, like it’s already got? (It don’t use captcha but there is an anti spam honeypot on the contact form and comment fields, which he could have easily checked by looking at the code.)
Can be installed a google map for your better reach.
But my business doesn’t need a map, I’m not a location based business. (I really am starting to think that Mike hasn’t visited my site…)
Footer sections will be implemented with call to action elements.
Say what now? More vagueness. The footer’s got my contact info in it. You know, with the email address he spammed me on…
XML Site Map for major search engines to index the pages of your website properly.
Erm like the one I’ve already got? (This is also VERY simple to check.)
Fully responsive design to all small screen size outfits like Mobile, I pad, tablets etc with call to action elements.(Mobile friendly)
Again, it is. It flies through mobile friendliness tests.
So out of the 12 items. They’re all either meaningless, I’ve already got them or they’re just plain wrong. Hmmmm.
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://pulpsys.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 19 errors. Oops – not a great start.
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 36 errors and 29 contrast errors – That’s not exactly good. My site has no errors of either kind!
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 38
Accessibility: 56
Best Practices: 83
SEO: 76
My site gets:
Performance: 98
Accessibility: 100
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 100
So my site is better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’.
There are three heading 1s on their home page – you should only have one.
There’s no privacy policy on the site. (Because of course there’s not…)
Their site uses an off the shelf theme called Porto. It’s quite a popular theme. So some (but not all) of the html, accessibility and speed issues are from the theme… (But not things like the three heading 1s and no privacy policy, they’re on Pulpsys.)
They have changed lots of the content – unlike some SEO spammers who just leave all the demo content in! However, several pages, like the Social Media Marketing and App Development have identical content to many other SEO sites. The same is true for everything on the home page. (Some copy and pasting has been going on me thinks…)
On their about page it says they have been in business over 10 years. But their domain was registered in February 2022 (so less than 10 months, let alone 10 years). (The domain was registered at various points between 2013 and 2020, but in its current state from Feb 2022.) BUT most of the text on their about page seems to have come from another site. The main para looks like it comes from a web agency in West Virginia and some other sub paras from a company in Bangalore/Bengaluru!
There’s one demo blog post on the site, supposedly posted in June 2021, so before the domain was registered for this site – erm, hmmmm. You can easily post-date blog posts in WordPress so I suspect they did this to make it seems like it’s been on there a while.
This would seem to be confirmed as if you Google the first line of the article, it looks that post was ‘borrowed’ from the Digital Marketing Institute, but only the first part of the post! There’s lots more of it on the DMI site! Oh and the DMI post was published in May 2022 – so nearly a year after the one on the Pulpsys site. So Pulpsys either have magical powers to write blog posts from the future, or the post on their site is dodgy in a couple of ways!!!
There are some testimonials on the home page. But three of the seven are also on the site for AlgoPage, an SEO spammer we dealt with back in April 2019. I don’t know if Pulpsys have a connection to AlgoPage or if they’ve just ‘borrowed’ some words from their site.
The other four testimonials might be genuine (I couldn’t find them with Google searches) but we do know that Pulpsys seem to like the copy and paste function, so who knows…
There’s one address on the site – an ‘office address’ in Texas, although the address is slightly oddly formatted, having both ‘Texas’ and ‘TX’ in it. You don’t write US addresses like that, you use one or the other!
Looking at the address on a map, it’s for a very normal, residential, house in a small town about 40km north of Amarillo. Not exactly where you’d expect to find the office for “the Best Digital Marketing Agency in TX” (as they claim to be)…
Googling the address is even more odd. It shows up on several people directory type sites, with about five different names/people supposedly living there! (I have no idea how accurate these types of site are but it’s all very strange.)
The phone number on the site is for the right area of Texas.
However, I’ve looked up Pulpsys in several Texas Business directories and there’s nothing for the current business…
A Google of “pulpsys” shows up less than 20 results – which seems very unusual for a company that’s been around for more than 10 years – but not surprising for spammers that have been around for a few months.
Using the ‘wayback machine’ (which archives websites), around 2018/2019 the domain was used for a design/seo company which had an address on it in Houston, Texas. But the footer of that site says it was designed/developed by a company called ‘Design Pulp’ (with a .in Indian domain ending). I also found a spammy looking wordpress.com site which supports this. (There is a BBB listing for the old Houston company but not for one anywhere near Amarillo and the business is not accredited.)
The Design Pulp domain is no longer working. But the wayback machine shows that from mid 2021 to early 2022 it was a shop selling shoes and jewellery in India. From 2013 to early 2020 the Design Pulp domain was used by a web/seo company in Bangalore/Bengaluru – who seemingly made the site for the design agency in Texas using the Pulpsys domain in 2018/2019…
So that’s all rather confusing. But I can find basically NOTHING about the current site/using of the domain.
Most of the current search results for ‘Pulpsys’ are sites which list domains which have been recently registered.
Interesting, there are a couple of sites which lists spam emails where there are basically identical spams from ‘Mark’. Rather amusingly, one of these was to the main site for Debian, which is a BIG operating system!
So I have no idea if the current usage of pulpsys.com has anything to do with the previous Texas based web/seo company or the Indian web/seo company that seemingly made their site for them. But ‘Design Pulp’ and ‘Pulpsys’ HMMMMMMMMMMMMM!??!?!?
But I will say that I’m not exactly convinced that the current company really do work in Texas!
If they really are in Texas, then their emails are very much in breach of both the USA’s CAN-SPAM laws and the UK’s PECR (where I live)…
Conclusion
Pulpsys are SEO spammers.
They send out spam from a different domain – which is dodgy in itself. They also don’t seem to know who their business is registered.
The claims on their spam were all very wrong.
They didn’t bother to reply to my emails asking the most basic of questions.
They seem to like to ‘borrow’ information from other sites and paste it on their own one.
If Pulpsys spam you, or you get an email from an @dmatexas.com address, clicking the delete button might well be the best option.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…