Report spammers to stamp out nuisance

JPCT 150713 Alan Stainer. Photo by Derek Martin

Chances are, if you own a website you will have seen countless e-mails that start something like the one below, which I received.

‘Hi, Hope you are well,

I was surfing through your Site and realized that despite having a great design; it was not ranking on any of the search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for most of the keywords relating to your business.’

They are so very annoying. They are also not worth your time in the slightest. Here is an excerpt from documentation on Google’s support site about this very thing.

‘Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

“Dear google.com,

I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...”

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself and indeed this advice is true whether you get e-mails about ranking on Google, cosmetic surgery for your - ahem - or get rich quick schemes.

Spamming often use services like Gmail and Yahoo, because they are free. Anyone can sign up and start plaguing the world.