Cleir.com

Robin at Link Worth[less] was "kind enough" to "volunteer" to be the Guinea pig.  She chose to click through on one of my adwords campaigns in order to send me spam about how her companies SEO could help me get better ratings.  They proposed to do so by selling me backlinks.

In preface to the thread of emails I would like to disclaim her companies method and provide some food for thought.  First - purchasing links with disregard to the traffic they might provide is throwing money away; you can be penalized by google who clearly outlined a stance on this as early as 2005 and have since reiterated.  Additionally based on experience prior - this technique has fallen by the wayside in terms of effectiveness.  While I am not necessarily the SEO genius that past testing would have you believe in this case there is a clearly defined white hat technique (use your money to provide content which people want to link to) and a poor one (pay for irrelevant links based on page rank).

I would advise all clients of cleir (and anyone else for that matter) to not do business with this company - if for no other reason then I believe what they are selling to be snake oil.  That said I have found a very effective way of dealing with this sort of solicitation. Reply in kind - solicit them with genuine white hat adwords campaign management and SEO and information about what is wrong with their "business model", their poor approach to advertising and promotion, and any other issues which you might stumble across.

Robin's email:

Hello,

My name is Robin Bellingham and I am an Account Manager with LinkWorth (www.linkworth.com). I noticed you were promoting your website through pay-per-click for the term dallas realtors and I was hoping to discuss the benefits of optimization with you. Judging by your current organic position for this keyword, it seems like you just need some targeted link building to get you closer to the top of the SERPs.

I would be more than happy to put together a free proposal for you if you're interested.


Robin Bellingham
Account Manager
LinkWorth
214-440-3915
866-LNK-WRTH (Toll Free)
214-488-5120 (FAX)


***** DISCLAIMER *****

This is a personalized commercial advertisement for LinkWorth.com. We do not harvest emails and this is not part of any sort of bulk mailer. Each message is sent individually to contact info found on your website. If you would prefer to not be contacted by LinkWorth in the future, submit your email here:
http://www.linkworth.com/tools/donotcontact.php
LinkWorth, 417 Oakbend Suite C1, Lewisville, TX 75067. 

My Response:

Hi Robin,

  As much as I appreciate
    you clicking through our paid advertisement irregardless of what it may have cost us
    in order to spam us
    and thus demonstrate how good you are at seo
  I am going to pass.

  I found that you also advertise on adwords but fail to rank prominently for your company name, my team can help optimize this for you.  Additionally I was unable to find your natural listings for any seo related terms - again we have some excellent SEO people in house (please excuse the ranking of home prodigy which is recently launched).  While I am sure you would be more than happy to reply with a 5 word phrase for which you do rank, as you may be able to tell by my sarcastic tone if we were interested in SEO offerings I think we would go with a company I could find as opposed to one who took the ill conceived approach that you have chosen.  Or one that could market in a novel way, instead of using a tactic which was outdated in its conception 5 years ago.  Or one which did not find itself soliciting business by spam and thus showing how few customers they have to better occupy their time.  Or one which was not offering paid links - something that are readily available without a middle-man and which google has explicitly labeled as black hat.  Etc.

  I would like to thank you in advance for not further contacting us - because we do not have any preexisting business arrangement contacting us in the manner your have with an unsolicited offer and is illegal.  This violates the can spam act - all further communication will be reported to the FTC

  Thanks and have a nice day,

Nalin Singapuri

Ouch! I would like to "thank" Ron for taking the additional time to follow up:

Hi Nalin,
 
I felt the need to send you a quick reply to apologize if we crossed you the wrong way.  Robin was not offering SEO to you, we provide/broker “Text Link Ads” and offer the service to people who do not have the time to do so.   We do just fine in natural listings if you search for terms related to what we do and we do not spend a dime on any pay per click advertising.  You probably are referring to affiliates that promote us through AdWords.
 
I also wanted to ensure you we did NOT click your paid ads.  It’s merely a way we find potential leads.  We use the url listed and manually enter the url into the browser.  Nothing more, nothing less.
 
The last thing was to address your comments of it being against the Can Spam Act of 2003.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm  
I took the liberty to supply the link which defines this law directly from the FTC website and you’ll be pleased to know we abide by every single clause to the law.
 
We can appreciate the fact you are not interested and respect your stance.  But just as I would hope you would do, I felt the need to not only stand up for my employee and our company, but to extend an explanation and most importantly, an apology for upsetting you.
 
Best of luck,
Ron Wicker, President
LinkWorth, LLC
214.440.3901

Though I will refrain from reiterating how futile text links are (in stark contrast to SEO which can be of large benefit if done well) I will give Ron points for knowing his can-spam.  According to the link provided he was correct in his stance that his email was not illegal.

I stand by the particulars of how poorly executed the campaign is - selling a product that can have a very derogatory ranking effect, based on spamming, in a manner that was boring 5 years ago is not a novel approach to business.