sitewizard SEO spam

[greenbarn]

This one's a bit more sophisticated than the generic and immediately deleted "We can put you on page 1 of Google" rubbish, inasmuch as it gives the appearance that somebody has done some background. A bit of googling turned up some interesting references, with a number of people pointing out that these "personalised" emails (yes, they'd all received them) could very easily be auto-generated from the output of web crawlers gathering basic information about your site and spitting it into a generic template (complete with grammatical errors).

The email I received reads:

Hi,

I came across your website this morning. I've done a little research on www.gr**********s. co.uk, and have jotted down a couple of notes about it, in terms of it's ranking in Google.

I hope you're OK with me pinging you a quick email, but I believe this will be of interest to you.

Your site has a fair number of pages (which is great) and I found 36 links to it (these are hyperlinks from other websites to yours). This means your site already has some of the groundwork done and we could make a dramatic improvement to your Google ranking in a very short space of time.

I'm sure it's worth us having a quick chat as I have lots more interesting information about getting your website to the first page of Google.

I work at SiteWizard.co.uk. We've been online marketing experts since 1997. We have a range of website promotion packages that I know will get your website lots more potential customers. We guarantee you will see positive results from one of our campaigns within 30-45 days. We have a really fantastic internal tool that enables us to find keyword niches by analysing some of Google's secret algorithm. Nobody else has this tool, and it's taken more than a year's work to develop. I'd love to perform some keyword research for you to find out what keyword niches are achievable for you, and what volume of additional site visitors you could expect. It'll be a complementary keyword analysis for you, so you have nothing to lose.

If you are interested in hearing how we can significantly increase the visitors to your website for a very low cost compared to conventional advertising, drop me an email reply and I'll whizz through the rest of the notes I made about your site.

If you've seen all the buzz about Twitter and Facebook and how they are being used to promote small businesses, you'll also be interested to hear that we have a really low cost management package for those, that has a great return on investment.

Have a great afternoon,

Kind Regards,

Alicia Stevens
Website Consultant

with a nice photo of Alicia just to prove she's not a robot (and possibly to track if the email's been opened....).

Sitewizard appear to be a bona fide company, and of course there's no reason to believe they couldn't do something to improve your website's presence, but before parting with hard-earned for their services, do google them, and then ask yourself the question as to why they are sending unsolicited advertising spam.

[PW in Polemi]

GB says "and ask yourself ..." - I would add "and how they manage to analyse Google's SECRET algorithm....."