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 we’ve got a different type of SEO spam. These spammers are targeting the ‘auto suggest’ or ‘auto complete’ results when you type a search term into a search engine.
However, they still start off with some rubbish spam… The email came in from a Richard who was using an autosuggest.email email address. The email came into the email account for my big Christmas site but interestingly came into an address which is related to my ‘Christmas Expert‘ site (I have a couple of Christmas type email addresses that com into one account). I don’t actively promote/share this email, so I’m not 100% how they got hold of it!
The subject was “the christmas carolers” and the spam went:
Good Afternoon ,
I like that The Christmas Expert is offering a wide range of services and has a lot of experience in the field of Christmas. It’s great to see you help people with their Christmas gift ideas.
We are 3 university friends who have developed a new approach to search marketing and I wanted to ask if this might be of interest to you.
The basic idea is to add your brand as a new autocomplete suggestion in the search engine, so users see The Christmas Expert while they are typing “the christmas carolers” for instance (other keywords are possible as well). This is what it would look like:
[Then there was a table made to look like a search auto suggest box with the following auto suggest results]
- the christmas carolers
- the christmas carolers recommendation the christmas expert
- the christmas carolers providers
- the christmas carolers comparison
- the christmas carolers online
- the christmas carolers test
This is different from conventional online marketing approaches, such as SEO or paid ads, which are often ineffective and too expensive , because everyone is using them.
AutoSuggest provides an instrument to connect with potential clients at the earliest point possible: while they’re still typing. Our service is an effective means to position your brand and get additional traffic and sales. Costs only occur when your suggestion has been successfully listed in the autocomplete function and provides value to you.
Therefore, I would like to invite you to take a look at our service , either by visiting our website, scheduling a call, or emailing me.
I would be delighted to introduce AutoSuggest to you. In case of any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.
Best regards
Richard[contacts removed for privacy]
I didn’t bother to reply to this as I know this kind of SEO is NOT a good idea…
Using the auto-suggest/auto-complete box and suggestions can help you with SEO. As you can research what people are searching for and then build ‘longtail’ results which you can incorporate into your site – in a natural and ‘good’ way.
If you’d like to know more about this (and so how to use auto-complete correctly), have a look at these links from reputable SEO sites:
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-autocomplete/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-autocomplete-a-complete-seo-guide/251407/
- https://moz.com/blog/google-autocomplete-seo-tool
But this is NOT what AutoSuggest is offering. I’m not 100% sure what they claim to do, as their website is incredibly vague about what they actually do and is just full of marketing waffle.
However, looking on ‘dodgy’ SEO forums, it seems that they might be doing a couple of different things.
They are most likely using bots/auto search tools (and sometime real people) to do lots of searches on longer terms, so that search engines ‘learn’ that the terms should go together and so show up in more auto-suggestions.
They might also be using fake (and spam) blog posts, comments, forum posts, etc. so that those other search terms appear near each other.
BOTH OF THOSE ARE NOT GOOD. They could well work (especially the first one). BUT they could (probably would) also likely be counted as ‘manipulation’ by Google, etc. (tricking search engines like this are known as ‘black hat’ SEO techniques) and could get your site in trouble…
Let’s look a bit more at the email from ‘Richard’.
First off, as I mentioned above, it came into a pretty new email account that is NOT on the web, so I’m not sure how they actually found it to spam (which is a bit questionable to start with!).
They’ve put a Christmas term ‘the christmas carolers’ together with ‘the christmas expert’ and it all goes down hill after that!
The first line of the email is:
I like that The Christmas Expert is offering a wide range of services and has a lot of experience in the field of Christmas. It’s great to see you help people with their Christmas gift ideas.
Well, that’s wrong on a couple of points!
First off, I AM NOT ‘offering a wide range of services’ – my Christmas Expert site is there to help media companies find someone they can talk to about Christmas history, etc.
Secondly, I DO NOT ‘help people with their Christmas gift ideas’.
Both of these would be obvious if they’d actually properly looked at my Christmas Expert site. (It’s also only a ‘one page’ site, so it really wouldn’t take much effort to see what the site is about…)
And the term ‘the christmas carolers’ is pretty irrelevant to my site. Now I can tell you about the history of Christmas carols should you wish, but it just does not fit with searching for ‘christmas expert’ (which my site is already #1 for on Google!)…
That’s not a very good start it is? Let’s take a deeper look at their site and business.
Richard spammed me from the domain autosuggest.email. This was registered in May 2021. There was a domain at the email’s footer: autosuggest-company.eu which was registered in March 2022. But if you go to either of these domains they auto forward to yet another domain autosuggest.net which was registered in February 2020 and seems to be their main domain.
So why isn’t Richard using an @autosuggest.net email address? Well, it might be because he’s a spammer and they don’t want their main domain associated with spam… This is a common spammer tactic.
Looking on their site, it seems that they’re a German based company. Like the UK (where I live), Germany has some pretty strong laws about marketing emails and how they can be sent.
In Germany the ‘anti spam’ law is known as UWG. Like PECR in the UK, it sets rules about the ‘consent’ needed to contact people – especially ‘individuals’ and you need to have ‘opt out’ mechanisms on emails in both laws.
(Under PECR ‘individuals’ and ‘businesses’ have different rules, but as ‘The Christmas Expert’ and even my web business, I count as an ‘individual’ as I don’t have a ‘Limited’ business. For ‘individuals’, you need specific ‘consent’ from someone to be able to send them marketing emails. UWG has some similar requirements.)
Looking on the Autosuggest site, Richard is listed as a ‘Campaign Manager UK’ (with a few other people) and he appears to be a real person – he’s a got a LinkedIn account and it seems that he might be in the UK.
However, Richard/AutoSuggest did not have my permission to email me and there’s no mention of how to opt-out on his spam (opt outs are required in PECR and UWG). So he and AutoSuggest seem quite happy breaking both German and UK laws. Oh and there’s also GDPR which covers about private data is stored in both countries (in slightly difference versions).
If you look up the domain autosuggest.net on TrustPilot. There are several 1* reviews saying they’re spammers. Well, what do you know!? (There are also three happy users as well… but) There are no reviews for autosuggest-company.eu or autosuggest.email. HOWEVER, there’s a review of autosuggest-service.eu from a person in Italy saying that they’re spammers. And one on autosuggest.io from person in Austria who says they’re spammers. Guess what, both autosuggest-service.eu and autosuggest.io also forward to autosuggest.net. (As does the domain autosuggest-info.eu)
If you Google their main domain, there are also listings for it on German and French review sites saying they’re spammers. (France, Italy and Austria also have anti-spam laws which their emails would seem to be in breach of…)
Can you detect a theme here?
In Richard’s email it says “We are 3 university friends who have developed a new approach to search marketing”, which would imply that Richard is one of the ‘3’ friends’. But he isn’t. The About page on the AutoSuggest site names the three friends and there’s not a Richard in there!
So this must be a spam template that all of the AutoSuggest employees use, even though it’s then not true… (or at the very least uses clumsy English)
Doing a Google search for that line about the 3 friends gets a result from the logs of a German chat server where someone shared this template from spam which came into their site in January 2023…
On the bottom of Richard’s email was a UK phone number but it was formatted VERY oddly. It’s using the ‘quite new’ London 0204 area code. You can easily get virtual numbers for this area code and it has a bit of a reputation for being used by some not so great companies…
Conclusion
AutoSuggest are SEO spammers.
They seem to use this same template to spam people across many countries and languages in Europe using multiple domains (which is a red flag in itself).
They seem to be based in Europe (which is a novelty for SEO spammers) but also seem quite happy to ignore the multiple anti-spam laws in countries across Europe!
Their site basically tells you nothing about what they do. But what I strongly suspect they do is NOT something I’d recommend doing.
So if you get an email from any of the multiple domains which AutoSuggest seem to use, the delete button is probably the best option.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…