Dealings with SEO Email Spammers & other Internet Scams
SEO Spam Email: 10 Horses
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.
This time the email came in from a ‘Amanda W. Dockery’ who was using a gmail.com email address. The email came into the contact form for my big Christmas site – so it was manually sent and wasn’t a bot. (I don’t normally add the family name of spammers for privacy, but 100% sure it’s a fake name.)
The spam went:
Hey there,
Hope you and your business are doing well. We’ve all been through so much this year!
I’m really sorry to bother you, and I know you are super busy, but I have been checking your website, and it seems that you are not ranking well for your ad words and key phrases. I actually help businesses like yours get a better ranking in google by using 10 proven techniques below.
I would really love the opportunity to work with you and your business, and bring your website to the top of Google’s list – the sweet spot where you get clicks and more business!
Please let me tell you some of the techniques that I can use below to help you get a better ranking in google search:
Title Tag Optimizations are missing, I can add these to your site.
Meta Tag Optimization descriptions are absent, I can add them too.
Heading Tags Optimization – No problem getting those put in there.
Targeted keywords are not placed into tags correctly.
Alt / Image tags Optimization is not present – it would take me seconds to write these.
Google Publisher is missing; I can set this up for you
Custom 404 Page is missing and I can create this for you.
The Products are not following Structured mark-up data, let me edit that in google webmaster tools.
Website Speed Development (Both Mobile and Desktop) I can make some tweaks and show you a speed performance using GTMetrics or Pingdom.
Content Creation SEO work-As a native English speaker, I can create fantastic articles that people will want to read and share, these will bring business to you by word of mouth rather than expensive promotion via google paid search.
I’m sorry if this sounds a little technical, but rest assured, these techniques will certainly improve you ranking in search. I am so confident that I will offer you a full refund of my fee should you not see an improvement in your google ranking within two months.
We’ve got lots to do together to make you stand out! Please give us the chance to work with you. You can see our rates on our website.
If this email has reached you by mistake, or if you do not wish to take advantage of this opportunity, please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused. We are a small business and we are just trying to get some customers. I’m sure you were in our position once too. Rest assured that we will not contact you again should you reply to this email with the word ‘unsubscribe’
Thank you kindly for your time and consideration,
Looking forward to working with you.
Kindest regards,
Looking forward
Thanks & Regards 10horses [contacts removed for privacy]
Well this is total rubbish! All those 10 items are wrong – as we’ll see below!
Also, as they spammed me via my contact form, I can’t ‘unsubscribe’ now can I?
On the footer of the email was an email address from their domain 10horses.com. So I repleid to both ‘Amanda’s’ Gmail account and the @10horses.com account – only the @10horses.com account bounced. Oops.
(A few days later, one of my clients had a pretty much identical email through their contact form. The only difference is that it was from a ‘James Hall’ and didn’t have the 10 Horses info on the bottom. More on this below…)
Anyway, this was my reply:
Hi Amanda,
That sounds interesting. Please can you tell me what’s wrong with my site. I know you’ve listed some things below, but can you tell me more?
Thanks.
That got this reply, from the Gmail account:
Thanks for your response
We are from 10horses.com
I would like to inform you that I have analysed your site and found some technical issues. . If you want to improve your website’s search traffic, authority score, and backlinks, then please let me know. We will make your website well-optimised and SEO friendly
I’ll prepare an optimized report for your website and will send it to you soon.
Thanks & Regards 10horses
I’ve inserted the image they included in their email. It shows the ‘Domain Authority’ (DA). I found in later emails (as below) that 10horses are using the Semrush SEO tools. Here’s the Semrush article on DA https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-authority-score-explained/
In the article is says:
“…[the Domain] Authority Score is used more for domain comparison, and not for determining good/bad on an absolute scale.”
So simply showing me an image with a score of ’52’ is really rather meaningless – but of course 10horses don’t tell you that. In fact that don’t explain ANYTHING on the image…
The image also has the number of links Semrush thinks my site has. Over 100k – that’s good right?!
So I replied:
Hi Amanda,
OK. You say you can make my website ‘well-optimised and SEO friendly’. What’s wrong with it?
I’d have thought that 100k+ back links was pretty good right?
The next day I got this reply from Amanda:
Hello
Good Morning
Spammy Backlinks: As per SEMRUSH report you have 100.9K total backlinks but Google showing only 112,000 results. (Go Google and search on this -links: https://www.whychristmas.com)
** Need to remove all the spammy backlinks that Google still does not index. Search results showing you have a huge quality backlink. But when we go through the links one by one we get only 112,000 links. So I need to remove the spammy backlinks along with build quality back-links.
I’ll prepare an optimized report for your website and will send it to you soon.
The image they put in the email shows a ‘Links’ search. Only there’s a couple of rather large issues with it.
And if it did work, it’s not done right. The search should be link:https://www.whychristmas.com – no ‘s’ on links and no space between the : and the url!
So the results they get are just daft. We can confirm this as the top two links are the ‘links’ pages (links from my site and link to my site pages).
Also they say “As per SEMRUSH report you have 100.9K total backlinks but Google showing only 112,000 results.” THAT MAKES NO SENSE. 100.9K is 100,900. That’s pretty close to 112,000 – so what the heck do they mean?
Also that’s NOT how to find ‘spammy backlinks’. You do that in the tool like Semrush or Ahrefs and look at the ‘domain authority’ of referring domains. You don’t simply compare a bunch of numbers, point at them and go ‘SPAM’!
Oops.
If I use the ‘Links’ tool within Google Search Console (GSC) I get 30k+ ‘external’ links. And if I use the Ahrefs and Ubersuggest tools, they show my domain has a great score and reputation.
GSC tells me that my average ‘click through rate’ from search results is 2%, that’s about average. But my top ones hit 30% which is AMAZING.
So they’re yet another SEO spammer using numbers, out of context, to look ‘scary’ and to try and get business.
I then got a follow up email with a ‘Website Optimization Report’. It went as follows:
Hello,
We Checked Properly whychristmas.com
WhyChristmas.com: The Most Christmas Information on the Web
**Meta Title is “Length: 59 character(s)”.
Meta Description: Christmas Traditions, Christmas Customs, Christmas History. Christmas Around the World in different countries. The Christmas Story. Christmas Fun!”
** Length: 146 character(s)
** Keep it short and to the point; the ideal meta description should contain between 160 and 300 characters (spaces included).
**Ensure that each of your web pages have a unique, straightforward meta description that contains most important keywords. These keywords are especially important because they appear in bold when they match the user’s search query (See the Google Preview below).
Keyword Consistency : *** Not Good
Need to Target Proper keywords
HTags Errors (Headings Tags Tag) – [Image showing the home page has 1 heading 1, four heading 2 and one heading 3 but not heading 4, 5 or 6]
Copy Content : We found copy content from your website. PLease check below
Text/HTML ratio : 14.04% — ouch! Your websites ratio of text to HTML code is below 15%. We suggest adding a lot more text to your website.
Underscores in the urls :
Touchscreen Readiness : **Make the most important buttons/links large enough to be tapped easily.
Mobile Frameworks : No mobile frameworks have been detected. – ** Mobile or responsive frameworks are an important part of website optimization as they assist developers in creating applications which are applicable to multiple devices.
Link with 4xx status code : Ex:
Deadlink Checker : Error 9
Google™ Analytics : Google™ Analytics is not monitoring your website. We suggest taking advantage of this great tool.
Note : If you want to solve this problem then we can help you at an affordable price. If you give us a chance then we can prove ourselves to you. Please let me know. After your confirmation we will start the work.
If you have any messenger ID(s) then that will help us to discuss.
We are always Available on – Whatsapp and Skype
I Will wait for your reply.
Well this is also (mostly) a load of rubbish – as we’ll also see below. Anyway, I thought it was time to ask ‘Amanda’ some more questions:
Hi Amanda,
I’ve been a web designer and developer for 20 over years. I reply to SEO spammers to see what ‘services’ they offer and the things they say and use to get clients.
My Christmas site www.whychristmas.com has also been on the web for over 20 years. It had well over 20 MILLION pageloads last year – so it’s doing pretty well!
Why did you spam my contact form with a spam template which lists 10 items – ALL of which are untrue?
Your comment “As per SEMRUSH report you have 100.9K total backlinks but Google showing only 112,000 results.” MAKES NO SENSE. 100.9K is 100,900. That’s pretty close to 112,000. So what are you actually saying?
You also appear to be using the Google ‘link’ method. Google’s said that’s no longer reliable for several years – https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-use-our-link-operator-23239.html – so why are you using it? (Oh and you’re using it wrongly when it did work…)
Your ‘Website Optimization Report’ is clearly just a copy and paste job from an SEO scanner. Have you actually checked any of the items? And more importantly, do you actually understand them? (It would appear not.)
For instance. The ‘4XX’ error. Well that’s on WhatsApp sharing code. It’s perfectly fine for that to have a 4XX code.
There’s are ‘errors’ because your tool can’t detect a ‘mobile framework’ or ‘Google Analytics. Well, it DOES NOT NEED a ‘mobile framework’ because the site works perfectly well on mobiles – that’s very easy to check. And I use Cloudflare’s privacy friendly analytics tool – which you could easily see by taking 10 seconds to look at the site’s code.
You simply copy & paste ‘Traffic Estimations : Medium’ without giving any context. My site is about Christmas. In December it gets over 20 million page loads. That’s not ‘medium’!
I get an ‘error’ because a page doesn’t H4-H6 headings – that’s ridiculous.
So shall we say I’m not impressed.
Please can you tell me why your company thinks it’s ok to spam people, from random email accounts, via contact forms, to get business?
Why do you think it’s ok to lie in your spam?
A couple of hours later, I got this reply:
Hello
We understand and we respect your decision.
Still, we are hoping to get a chance to work for your project in the future.
If you need any digital marketing or website design or app development services then please let us know. We will be happy to serve you.
Possible to talk via WhatsApp ,Signal or skype messenger ?We are also available on Zoom and Google Meet for project discussion.
Looking forward to hearing from you
Thanks & Regards
Hmmm, ok. They ‘respect my decision’ yet still think that I might want to work with them. Hmmmm. And they’d not answered my questions about why they spam people. So I asked again:
HI,
OK and I’m glad you respect my decision. But you’ve not answered my questions:
Why do you think it’s ok to spam people, via their contact form?
Why did your spam contain blatant lies?
With 1 and 2, why should any trust you?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
That was a week now and I’ve not had a reply. I guess 10 Horses are yet another SEO spammer that don’t like to answer why they spam people…
Their Report & Recommendations
Let’s have a look through all of the ‘issues’ that Amanda said my site had.
First, let’s look at the items in her original contact form spam:
Title Tag Optimizations are missing, I can add these to your site. WRONG. All the pages on my site have optimised title tags.
Meta Tag Optimization descriptions are absent, I can add them too. WRONG. They all have meta description tags. This is an outright lie.
Heading Tags Optimization – No problem getting those put in there. WROING. All the pages uses HTML heading tags correctly.
Targeted keywords are not placed into tags correctly. WRONG. See above.
Alt / Image tags Optimization is not present – it would take me seconds to write these. WRONG. See above.
Google Publisher is missing; I can set this up for you Well, this is true. But it’s also IRRELEVANT. The Google Publisher tag is used if you have Google ads on my site. I don’t. Thus I DO NOT need it.
Custom 404 Page is missing and I can create this for you. WRONG. There’s a 404 page. They could have easily checked and found this.
The Products are not following Structured mark-up data, let me edit that in google webmaster tools. WRONG. I DO NOT sell products on my site. They could have seen this is about 30 seconds of visiting my site. Remember, they spammed me via my site’s contact form, so we know they have actually been to the site!
Website Speed Development (Both Mobile and Desktop) I can make some tweaks and show you a speed performance using GTMetrics or Pingdom. WRONG. My site gets 100/100 on Google’s Pagespeed tool, A/100% on GTMetrix (they spelt it wrong!) and 90/100 on Pingdom. (Their site gets 73/100 on Pagespeed, C/82% on GTMetrix and 68/100 on Pingdom. So, erm yeah.)
Content Creation SEO work-As a native English speaker, I can create fantastic articles that people will want to read and share, these will bring business to you by word of mouth rather than expensive promotion via google paid search. Yeah, no, this is a LIE. From looking at their site, they ARE NOT ‘native English speakers’ and I wouldn’t trust them anywhere NEAR my site!
So out of those 10 items, 8 are simply WRONG, one is IRRELEVANT and the other is a LIE. That’s really not a good start is it…?
Let’s move onto the ‘Website Optimization Report’ (which they mainly copied and pasted!)
Meta Title: WhyChristmas.com: The Most Christmas Information on the Web **Meta Title is “Length: 59 character(s)”. The rule of thumb for a ‘good’ title length is 60 characters. So 59 is BRILLIANT. But of course they don’t say that..
Meta Description: Christmas Traditions, Christmas Customs, Christmas History. Christmas Around the World in different countries. The Christmas Story. Christmas Fun! ** Length: 146 character(s) ** Keep it short and to the point; the ideal meta description should contain between 160 and 300 characters (spaces included). Well, 160 is really the limit you should go to. So again, 148 is really good!
**Ensure that each of your web pages have a unique, straightforward meta description that contains most important keywords. These keywords are especially important because they appear in bold when they match the user’s search query (See the Google Preview below). Erm, I DO!!!
Keyword Consistency : *** Not Good Utter rubbish. They DO NOT say what keywords they were targeting. So they simple CANNOT know if this is true or not!
Need to Target Proper keywords I DO.
HTags Errors (Headings Tags Tag) – [Image showing the home page has 1 heading 1, four heading 2 and one heading 3 but not heading 4, 5 or 6] As I said in my email to Amanda, this is plain stupid. Not having a heading 4, 5 or 6 WILL NOT hurt your SEO!
Copy Content : We found copy content from your website. PLease check below My site has sub navigation(s) on all the pages in the same section. This is fine. Google can work this out and specifically says that duplicate content like that is fine…
Text/HTML ratio : 14.04% — ouch! Your websites ratio of text to HTML code is below 15%. We suggest adding a lot more text to your website. Well, no. My home page is indeed that. But it’s a glorified landing page. Basically any other page on my site are about 50% which is just fine.
Underscores in the urls : This is really odd. My site did have underscores in the URLs (back 20 years ago when I made the site, that was the ‘seo’ way to do things!) but it hasn’t for at least EIGHT MONTHS! All the URLs also have 301 redirects to the new non underscore versions. So I have no idea what old tool they (or Semrush) used to find any urls with underscores!
Touchscreen Readiness : **Make the most important buttons/links large enough to be tapped easily. The site is VERY mobile friendly. They could have easily tested this.
Mobile Frameworks : No mobile frameworks have been detected. – ** Mobile or responsive frameworks are an important part of website optimization as they assist developers in creating applications which are applicable to multiple devices. As I said in my email to Amanda, it DOES NOT NEED a ‘mobile framework’ because the site works perfectly well on mobiles – that’s very easy to check.
Link with 4xx status code : As I said to Amanda, it’s on WhatsApp sharing code. It’s perfectly fine for that to have a 4XX code. Any half decent SEO company or web developer would have actually looked at what the auto report spat out and would have seen that it’s fine.
Deadlink Checker : Error 9 Again, any decent SEO/web person would have looked and checked what these actually were. They’re all from sites ‘bouncing’ the dead link checker bot and so they through an error. If you actually visit the supposedly dead links, they are all fine!
Google™ Analytics : Google™ Analytics is not monitoring your website. We suggest taking advantage of this great tool. As I said to Amanda, use Cloudflare’s privacy friendly analytics tool – which they could have easily seen by taking 10 seconds to look at the site’s code.
Traffic Estimations : Medium As I said to Amanda, if they think that 20 million page loads in December is a ‘medium’ amount of traffic, I’d love to know what ‘high’ is!
Domain Authority – 65 Page Authority – 51 See above!
Facebook Page : Twitter™ Account : Instagram Account : Not Found Youtube Account : Linkedin Account : Not Found All SEO spammers seem to tell that you need to do more social media (even if you do a load) and that it’s terrible if you don’t have an account on every platform. Social media can certainly help, but the ‘errors’ they gave a generally rubbish.
Blog : Not found a Blog on this website. IT DOES NOT NEED ONE. Actually, most sites don’t need a blog! Again, blogs can help SEO but they’re not a must have.
So, like their initial spam template, this is mostly rubbish. And where things are correct, they’ve not actually explained anything in any meaningful or helpful way. SEO tools are great for SEO professionals to understand. However, simply copying and pasting results from them to make things look bad/scary is not a good or professional way of doing business.
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 is at 10horses.com which was registered in February 2022 (so about a year ago).
Their site has 13 HTML errors. That’s not too bad for SEO spammers! But my site has none.
Using the WAVE Accessibility checking tool, their site has 6 errors and 49 contrast errors. That’s not good. My site has none.
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 73 Accessibility: 80 Best Practices: 83 SEO: 93
My site gets:
Performance: 100 Accessibility: 100 Best Practices: 100 SEO: 100
So my site is ‘better’ (well perfect!) across the board.
The site’s menu is very broken on most laptops and tablets. It goes vertical and takes up most of the screen. There’s also a huge dropdown for the ‘Services’ which make it basically impossible to use some of the menu items.
On most laptops several layout items are broken with buttons getting covered up.
There’s no privacy policy on the site. That breaks the law in many countries. They’re also using Analytics and Ad tracking cookies without saying anywhere on the site that they’re doing so. That also breaks multiple international laws.
There are social media profiles links in the footer. But Facebook and Twitter don’t link to anything! The links for Tumblr and Pinterest accounts do go somewhere – but both profiles are empty – like there is NOTHING in them whatsoever – not even a logo.
However, a Google of the domain turned up a Twitter account, where they claim to be in the USA. (I don’t think they’re in the USA.)
There are also email and phone links in the footer. Only they’re not configured properly and won’t work as they should. And the Phone link is prefixed with ‘C :’. I’ve NEVER seen this before. Phone numbers are normally prefixed with ‘P:’. I guess C is for ‘Call’ or ‘Cell’?! (Similar links are coded correctly on the About page – so they know how to do it, they’ve just not bothered in the footer…)
On Amanda’s email is an Indian phone number and in her original spam to my contact form she put she was in India. But the number on the site is an American one with an area code in North Western Ohio.
There is NOTHING on the site saying where they’re located. On the Contact page there’s no address or anything like that – just a contact form.
But interestingly, in the Meta description on the about page, they say they’re in the UK. Hmmmm. (I don’t think they’re in the UK.)
On the About page they list their ‘Senior Leadership Team’ who all appear to have stock photos. They all have ‘western’ names and faces. I very much doubt that any of these people have any connection to 10 Horses whatsoever.
There’s also basically nothing of any substance on the About page. It’s just full of marketing speak. In fact I ran the text on the About page through an online ‘bullshit detector’ [excuse my French] and it scored 80/100. I think that about sums it up.
So where are 10 Horses located?
I think they’re in India. ‘Amanda’s’ spam said they’re in India. Their domain was registered in February 2022 in Punjab, India. The IP address that sent the spam, via my contact form, is from Kolkata, India. (As was the IP that sent the identical spam to my client. They were both on IPs from the same broadband provider – that makes me think my client’s spam is also from 10 Horses…)
In the meta description on the home page, it says they offer results “to the overseas clinets”; having a phrase like ‘to the’ is very common in English spoken in the Indian sub-continent (and it also has a spelling error…). On the contact page, although their Indian number isn’t in the main text, it is in the meta description for that page.
I also found a Facebook page for them. There’s only a few posts and NO information about the company. However, there are some very unhappy comments left on the posts. These accuse them of being ‘Indian Scammers’ and asking why they removed their Google Reviews.
Now the above might sound like I’m having a go simply because they’re in India. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have no issues with Indian based web companies; but I do have issues with any company that flat out lies!
Conclusion
10 Horses are SEO spammers.
They really seem to like spamming contact forms.
They put fake names and use random Gmail accounts associated with these names.
Most of the things they said about my site were wrong, misleading or irrelevant. They also did not satisfactorily explain anything about the ‘issues’ they found.
When asked to explain why they spam with lies, they don’t answer.
Their own site is full of marketing rubbish with basically no real or useful information.
So if 10 Horses spam you, hitting the delete button might be a good idea.
