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 an ‘Harsita’ who was using a gmail account with her name and some numbers in it. The email came into my big Christmas site.
The subject was “SEO report with prices…?” and it went:
Hello, [email protected]
As an SEO expert, I can send you an SEO report if you give permission. It will shed light on a few things that will help you improve your search results.
These things are easy to understand. It will familiarize you with what needs to be done to improve your website’s ranking dramatically.
If you feel interested in it, then let me know and I will send you SEO prices and packages.
With Warm Regards,
Harsita
Consultant
Fairly standard SEO spam… So I replied.
Hi,
That sounds interesting. Please send over the SEO report.
Thanks.
Four days later I got a reply from Rahil who was using an @digitalguider.com email address. It had the subject “Can we schedule a time to discuss your business website?” and it went:
Hi,
I hope you are doing well.
Please refer to the response that we have received from you.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
From: Why Christmas
Date: Sat, 29 Apr, 2023, 10:13 pm
Subject: Re: SEO report with prices…?
To: Harsita SharmaHi,
That sounds interesting. Please send over the SEO report.
Thanks.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
In response to your reply,As you have shown your interest in SEO services along with website focus. I would be glad to offer you our services.
I checked your website https://www.whychristmas.com/about In my analysis, I found several bugs and errors on your website that need to be fixed. Going further into the analysis, I found your current low ranking. Your competitors are getting much more effective output through their organic traffic.
While Google is constantly rolling out updates to its search engine algorithm, and SEO fundamentals will never change, it is essential to use the updated tactics to get your website to rank higher in the search results.
To increase the ranking, we optimise the entire website per Google SEO guidelines to boost its performance in search engines.
The pricing of SEO packages by Digital Guider:
[Price table]
You can also visit our website to see all the activities: Click Here [link removed]
Please suggest a suitable date and time so that we can schedule a call which will allow me to explain our services to you and discuss further:
Your business model
Potential growth of your website
The requirements of your website
The area that you are targeting.We can help you further promote your business online, which would make you rank high in search engines for relevant keywords, but we will also help you uplift your brand in the market.
“Click Here to Schedule a Meeting”.
Herein I’m enclosing the Audit Reports of your website. Please find the attachments given below.
Thanks & Regards,
M.Rahil
Business Growth Hacker
Digital Guider, LLC
We work from 9 AM – 6 PM EST[contacts removed for privacy but it included an address in the USA, this is important below!]
A fairly standard ‘we can do everything’ reply. I found it interesting they put my ‘about’ page as the thing they’d looked at – WHY?! Odd. Anyway, I replied and I had some questions for Rahil…
Hi Rahil,
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.
You say that “I found several bugs and errors on your website that need to be fixed. Going further into the analysis, I found your current low ranking. Your competitors are getting much more effective output through their organic traffic.”
But the report gives it 91/100 and says “A score above 70 tells you that your website is probably well optimized and ready for a digital marketing campaign.”
So my site is well optimised but also has lots of errors?! That seems rather contradictory…
My site is number 1 on all of Google for many search terms. It DOES NOT have a ‘low ranking’. Also how do you know who my competitors are? You’ve not even asked me what search terms I’m targeting!
I also have some questions.
Please can you tell me why your company thinks it’s ok to spam people, from random email accounts, to get business?
Why do you have an address in Wyoming, when all the work is actually being done in Noida or Lucknow (under Graygraph Technologies) yet that’s not mentioned anywhere on the site?
is your company 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 your site says you’re based), you are breaking several aspects of CAN-SPAM compliance: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
For CASL in Canada, you need consent to send electronic marketing – which you did not have: https://fightspam-combattrelepourriel.ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canada-anti-spam-legislation/en/getting-consent-send-email (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 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.
Later that day I got this reply:
Hi Mr Cooper,
Thank you for your response.
I would like to answer your question, please check below
Please can you tell me why your company thinks it’s ok to spam people, from random email accounts, to get business?
Firstly, we are not sending spamming emails to anyone or everyone. We have a marketing team who sends emails to connect with them as you did receive initially. It’s just not us kindly check your inbox you have been receiving more than 100+ emails every day and all of them are not from India or anywhere but from the US, UK, CANADA, etc.
Secondly, Every business has its own marketing strategies to reach their potential clients or customers, I hope you might be aware of the same example, cold calls and emails from Comcast, At&T, real estate, forex traders, stock traders, etc. Everyone does and they all are from US, UK, Etc.
Why do you have an address in Wyoming, when all the work is actually being done in Noida or Lucknow (under Graygraph Technologies) yet that’s not mentioned anywhere on the site?
We (Digital Guider) is registered on the given address on our website Sheridan, WY. The work is getting done from the US and India (Development Centre), we have a proper Content writing team from the US as per the client’s requirements.
Graygraph LLC is also registered in US and India as well. So, we are representing DG, not Graygraph that’s why it has not been mentioned on our website it’s (DBA).I’m sure I answered your questions.
Yes, you are absolutely, right I should have asked for the search terms you are targeting, but I assume which was wrong that your Amazon listing you are highly interested towards https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/wishlist/1P2MJ3PSPH9VE
To which I had a response
Hi Rahil,
Thank you for your reply. However, you don’t seem to understand the law regarding spam in the USA!
As you say, Digital Guider are a US registered company. Thus you come under the CAN-SPAM act. The CAN-SPAM act which covers “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service”. So this would include the email I received from Harsita.
Under the FTC’s guide to complying with CAN-SPAM (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business), Harsita’s email, sent on behalf of Digital Guider is in breach of CAN-SPAM on the following points:
Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
Harsita’s email DO NOT say it was being sent on behalf of Digital Guider. It was sent via a random Gmail account, not a business domain based email account. If you’re going to send out marketing emails on behalf of your business, why did you not do so from your own business domain?
Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
Harsita’s email DID NOT include any location or postal information. I know the ones from yourself do. That’s too late under CAN-SPAM!
Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
There was NO opt out on Harsita’s or your emails.
You say “We have a marketing team who sends emails to connect with them as you did receive initially.”
Under CAN-SPAM you [Digital Guider] have to:
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.
So Digital Guider is legally responsible for any emails sent by your marketing team. Whether directly employed or done so via a third party.
You also say “It’s just not us kindly check your inbox you have been receiving more than 100+ emails every day and all of them are not from India or anywhere but from the US, UK, CANADA, etc.”
Indeed. Spam is a HUGE problem. However “everyone else does it” IS NOT A VALID EXCUSE under the CAN-SPAM Act!
So yes, under the definitions given by the CAN-SPAM Act (the law of the USA) you are ARE sending spam and are in breach of the act for multiple reasons.
I can see from business registration records that Graygraph was registered about three months before Digital Guider in 2017. Both use the same address in Wyoming; one which belongs to a company that files business forms and offers a virtual address and mail forwarding.
The CEO of Graygraph was the person who registered Digital Guider, so they are very much connected businesses. So I find it puzzling that the Digital Guider site has no information about any locations in Noida, whereas the Graygraph site does!
If they’re effectually the same company, why wouldn’t you have all of your contact information on both sites?
Yes, it would have been nice if you’d asked about my keywords. Can you tell me
why you would you use an Amazon wishlist as the basis for my keywords? (You must have taken a good look through my site to find the link to that wishlist, it’s pretty well hidden!)Wouldn’t it seem better more appropriate to actually look at the contents of the site?
In your first email to me you said “Going further into the analysis, I found your current low ranking. Your competitors are getting much more effective output through their organic traffic.”
Please can you explain your initial analytical process to me? Who did you think my computers were and why?
Had you (or Harsita) done any basic checks on some of the main pages of my site and seen if/how my site already ranks for terms such as “Christmas around the world”, “Christmas Traditions and Customs” and “The Christmas Story”?
My site currently rank #1 on Google for ALL of those!
Best wishes,
James
That got the following reply, but Rahil really doesn’t seem to get it…
Hi Mr Cooper,
I’m sure you received my email from [email removed for privacy]. Harshita didn’t send any email on behalf of Digital Guider.
When you talk about the Graygraph and Digital Guider connections, what has been mentioned or not mentioned, logically or technically both are registered and verified companies. There’s nothing to hide in it, if you would ask me nicely, I would have told you straight away maybe I could have invited you to our Indian Development Centers as well.
As talk about spamming activities, kindly check below.
Do you email everyone who’s doing the below activities with you?
Firstly, we are not sending spamming emails to anyone or everyone. We have a marketing team who sends emails to connect with them as you did receive initially. It’s just not us kindly check your inbox you have been receiving more than 100+ emails every day and all of them are not from India or anywhere but from the US, UK, CANADA, etc.Secondly, Every business has its own marketing strategies to reach their potential clients or customers, I hope you might be aware of the same example, cold calls and emails from Comcast, At&T, real estate, forex traders, stock traders, insurance, etc. Everyone does and they all are from US, UK, Etc.
However, thanks a lot to share the information, I’m aware of.
To which I replied:
Hi Rahil,
It was Harsita, not Harshita who sent me the initial contact email on behalf of Digital Guider. You referenced it and even included part of it at the top of your first email to me!
I thought I did ask you nicely about the connection between the companies. I said “Why do you have an address in Wyoming, when all the work is actually being done in Noida or Lucknow (under Graygraph Technologies) yet that’s not mentioned anywhere on the site?”
Isn’t that a reasonable question to ask? You now say that much of the work for Digital Guider is done in your Indian Development Centers – that’s great! I also now understand some of the writing is done in the USA, also great.
All I was really asking is why the full locations of the business aren’t disclosed on the Digital Guiders site? I find it puzzling that they’re listed on the Graygraph site and aren’t on the Digital Guiders site…
Yes, I do actually reply to many spammers – especially the ones who are in breach of anti-spam laws in the countries where they have businesses registered!
Sadly much of this spam, which arrives in my inbox, is from SEO companies based in various countries around the world. Some companies seem unaware of the laws in their respective locations and also many seem simply not to care…
Best wishes, James
Well, I never heard back from Rahil… All of this happened in April 2023, but guess who spammed me in August? Yep, Digital Guider! I got some spam from another random Gmail account with the subject “Your Website Audit Reports – Yes”.
I replied to it and then got a reply from an ‘Emily’ from Digital Guider. I replied back to both Emily and Rahil asking why Rahil never replied to me back in April, but they haven’t replied…
Hmmmmmmmmm, oh well.
Their Report & Recommendations
The report was actually one of the better ones I’ve received from SEO spammers. However, it was also obviously done using an auto tool, which hadn’t been fully checked.
It had a big score of ’91’ on the front page. 91/100 – that’s pretty good right!? In fact under the ’91’ in the opening text it says:
A score above 70 tells you that your website is probably well optimized and ready for a digital marketing campaign.
So, yep, my site is already good! The only things stopping it getting higher are mostly irrelevant ones to my site like it not being in local business listings (it’s not a ‘local’ site with an address) and not being on Instagram or LinkedIn (which the site doesn’t need).
So when then did Rahil say:
“I found several bugs and errors on your website that need to be fixed. Going further into the analysis, I found your current low ranking. Your competitors are getting much more effective output through their organic traffic.”
That’s simply rubbish. They have no idea who my ‘competitors’ are because they’ve not even asked my what I’m targeting yet! I suspect that every site that Digital Guider ever looks at has ‘several bugs and errors’ as that the reply was just a template.
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 main domain is at digitalguider.com which was registered in October 2017.
This site has 35 HTML errors. Not a great start!
Using the WAVE Accessibility checking tool, this site has 22 errors and 39 contrast errors. More not goodness…
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool the site gets:
Performance: 31
Accessibility: 87
Best Practices: 67
SEO: 79
My Christmas site has 0 HTML or Accessibility errors and gets 100/100 for all four items on Lighthouse. So, hmmmmmm, yeah.
The alt on their logo is ‘Digital Guider logo’ – it shouldn’t have logo on the end!
There are two headings 1s on the page – but one is empty. It looks like they put a blank one in for spacing. Don’t do that, use some CSS to add a margin…
In the email exchange with Rahil, there was lots about the location of the company, so let me explain some more…
In the footer on the site, in Rahil’s email, used in their social media, and all over their report is an address in Wyoming, USA. However, when you look this address up, it’s actually for a company called “Wyoming Corporate Office” who offer virtual offices, mail forwarding and doing ‘business’ type things for other companies to make them look more official.
There’s nothing wrong with using a service like that. However, there is something wrong with putting a address on your emails, website and other marketing materials to make you look something which you are not seems somewhat disingenuous at best.
Their about page has NOTHING of any substance about the company. There’s just a few paragraphs of meaningless marketing waffle.
Also in the site’s footer and spammy looking SEO links targeting cities across the USA – where they’re also not located!
And they also don’t seem to know about US geography, as the URLs for some of these pages do not match up with the real location of the cities. Last time I checked, New York was not in Alaska and Seattle wasn’t in Alabama!
On their home page, there’s a large section about using SEO for companies which sell cannabis. Erm, yeah… This is also VERY interesting considering that they use a Wyoming address; as Wyoming has about the strictest anti-cannabis laws in the USA!
On their LinkedIn profile, in the ‘People’ section it says they have 38 employees. Under this are some number bars with locations. It says 27 out of the 38 work in India with only 11 in the USA (with only three of those being in Wyoming). Hmmmmm.
I have been able to find Digital Guider in the Wyoming Business Register – when they applied in 2017. The application was made by a company called ‘Graygraph Technologies LLC’ with the same ‘business’ address as Digital Guider (i.e. the company that does things for you) but with the person who registered the company being located in New York!
Looking up the Graygraph Technologies entry, it was registered three months before Digital Guider.
I also found Graygraph’s site. It’s for another web/SEO/design company. That site also lists the Wyoming address. BUT there are also ones in Noida and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India! They also use the Indian addresses on the Graygraph social media accounts.
On the Graygraph LinkedIn profile, it lists the Wyoming address but very much as a ‘second’ one behind the Noida one (that doesn’t mention Lucknow). It’s also got job ads all in Noida…
There were two contact names on the business registrations. A Google of one of these names doesn’t show up much – apart from it seems quite a common name in the Philippines! But the other name is much more interesting – as it’s the CEO of Graygraph Technologies Pvt Ltd (an Indian business type) – who lives in… Noida!!!
So it would appear that Digital Guider is a ‘shell/front’ business under Graygraph Technologies and that it’s primarily based in Noida, and very much NOT Wyoming… (There’s no mention of India on the Digital Guider site whatsoever.)
Now there could be some real connection with Wyoming – however tenuous, but I very much doubt that any actual SEO or web work is being done outside of Noida or Lucknow!
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!
Digital Guider and Graygraph Technologies ARE legal entities within Wyoming and that means that they both fall under the remit of the US CAN-SPAM act.
The (multiple) spam I got from them IS VERY VERY MUCH NOT ALLOWED UNDER CAN-SPAM!!! They might also claim that the original spam came from a ‘third party’. However, under CAN-SPAM, they’re also responsible for any marking actions taken by people they get to do things for them.
They’ve got lots of good reviews on their site as well on places like Google and Trustpilot. HOWEVER, there are also quite a few one star reviews saying they’re useless spammers! A couple of reviews on Google even say that they seem to have removed lots of previous one star reviews…
So they might be able to do good work. I don’t know about that. But what I do know is that they’re spammers, pure and simple.
Conclusion
Digital Guider / Graygraph Technologies are SEO spammers.
They send out spam from random Gmail accounts and then deny they’re responsible for sending them.
They make false claims in follow up emails.
Their own site is full of basic HTML errors.
So if you get an email from Digital Guider, the delete button might well be the best option.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…