Comment Spammers from Australia

Dear comment-spamming morons at foundagency.com.au, and their customers who probably didn’t know better at allrealestate.co.nz

Hi. I don’t appreciate it what you’re doing with the blogs that I manage, subverting its intended purposes so that you can make money, by creating comments on my stories for the sole purpose of having a link to a site you are “SEO-ing”.

My blogs are:

• http://www.webfroot.co.nz

You might notice that both of these blogs use the rel="nofollow" attribute on links entered using the comments form. Google openly IGNORES any links with this attribute applied to it by not giving any of that page-rank goodness to the target site that you’re trying to achieve. More information here at the Official Google Blog and Google’s site itself.

While I appreciate your SEO company has hungry employee mouths to feed, I’d appreciate it that you’d take your scum-of-the-earth “optimisation techniques” and retire them.

What I am demanding you do:

1. Continue to use Ethical SEO techniques, but stop using the unethical techniques, like the link spamming you’re doing right now. See Wikipedia’s entry on Search engine optimisation for more info on ethical and unethical SEO techniques.
2. Stop mis-using other people’s blogs to pimp your wares.
3. If you MUST spam peoples blogs, at the very least, don’t waste your time with blogs that use rel="nofollow".
4. Remove my blogs from your un-ethical blog-abusing SEO machine.
5. Stop selling lies to companies that you can improve their ranking on Google.

I’ve posted this communication on my blog for all to see at this URL. And you’ll note that the links to your websites have rel="nofollow" applied to them.

Screw you guys,

Brett Taylor

UPDATE: Zak from The Found Agency just contacted me on my cellphone from Sydney, and after a short friendly chat I have provided him with the comment records from my databases. He was really friendly and deadly serious about looking into it within their organisation, which is a real credit to FoundAgency. I really appreciated the call, Zak 🙂

As the email address on the comments entered was the main reason for tying the comment to The Found Agency, it’s true that they could have been framed. I checked their site, and saw they did SEO stuff, and one of their clients was a real-estate website. It could have been entered into the form by anyone — but it got past my spam filter, so it’s unlikely that it was automated.

He also saw that I was coming over to Sydney next week for WE05, and invited me to The Found Agency offices to see what they do and how they are not blog spammers, which I intend to do. If it turns out that I was wrong, I guess I’ll be buying Zak a beer 😉

HAPPY ENDING: Turns out Zak is buying the beer 😉 It turns out that a new employee got over-eager to impress at his new job, and that employee has now been put to the task of collating a list of the sites he posted to, and I’ve been told that The Found Agency will be apologising personally to the owners of those sites.

Good has been done here. A problem solved. I’m going to be dropping by The Found Agency while I’m in Sydney, and I’ll report back. I hope that I’ll be able to come away from this meeting and recommend The Found Agency in the future! They certainly took this seriously and are taking excellent steps to rectify this occurance, which is highly commendable.