Funny article from Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineLand.com, unfortunately we’ve seen a few of our clients fall for this crap…if you’re reading this please don’t follow suit.
Warning Sign 1: Unsolicited
If it is an unsolicited pitch. You are 99.999999999999% safe simply trashing these types of emails. Make it 100%.
Warning Sign 2: Company Not Named
Who does the sender work for? Her company isn’t mentioned. Either she’s repping for some other company, or she doesn’t want to list the company until she’s vetted out that the person she (if it really is a she) is going to dupe.
Warning Sign 3: Pitch Demonstrates No Research Done
The pitch simply references a domain name I own. In our case (an SEO company) anyone going to that domain would, in short order, realize we’re probably not the person to pitch SEO to. Given this, the pitch demonstrates that no real “research” about my industry or my company was actually done, as promised.
Warning Sign 4: Fake Address Provided
Who puts a physical address into an email? There’s only one reason to do that. To make people who aren’t familiar with the internet somehow feel like the pitch must be legit, because it’s associated with a “real” address.
That’s not actually reassuring, and it certainly isn’t after it turns out the address doesn’t even exist (or if it does, Google can’t find it).
Warning Sign 5: Same Pitch, Over & Over
All those reasons above are enough to ignore a particular pitch on its own. But if someone needed more proof, yesterday, we got the same pitch four times in a row, all supposedly from four different people:
- Pamela J. Maness, of 3882 Goff Avenue, Grand Rapids, MI 49503
- Patricia May, of 1906 Brassie Dr Saint Louis, MO- 63114-5730
- Christine Allen, of 2590 Coventry Court, Baton Rouge, LA 70814
- Melanie Cheek, also of 2590 Coventry Court, Baton Rouge, LA 70814
Warning Sign 6: Disposable Email Used
The email addresses used by all of these are another sign. One was a Gmail account, rather than using the domain name of a particular company. That makes it disposable, which it’ll need to be, because it’ll likely get flagged for spam and perhaps closed after this type of fishing expedition.
The others were all mygbiz.com addresses. Not familiar with those? They’re provided to people who use a trial edition of Google Apps, making them also disposable. As Google explains:
The advantage of using a mygbiz.com domain is that you can try Google products without affecting your business domain, or without purchasing a new domain if you don’t have one.
Handy. Maybe Google shouldn’t let anyone use these addresses, since this type of behaviorshould impact their business domain. But still, the people would just switch to a Gmail account. Or Hotmail. Or Yahoo. Or Outlook.com. If the pitch is coming from someone using any of these domains, it’s almost certainly not coming from someone with a solid business behind them.
