Amazingly enough I actually received 2 extortion e-mails yesterday which were sent to the Search Engine Academy. I thought it may make an interesting SEO case study so I am including the form e-mail message below.
John Alexander
—————
Hello,
Read this email very carefully.
This is an extortion email.
We will do NEGATIVE SEO to your website by giving it 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks (permanent & mostly dofollow) pointing directly to your website and hence your website will get penalised & knocked off the Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) forever, if you do not pay us $1,500.00 (payable by Western Union).
This is no false claim or a hoax, download the following Notepad file containing 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks pointing to http://www.negativeseo.cn.pn/ (this is our website and go and see on this website, you will find our email address speed.seo.2014@gmail.com from which this email right now is being sent to you) :
http://www.mediafire.com/download/eizjwnpq2rsrncu/20000-XRumer-Forum-Profile-Backlinks-Dofollow.txt
Just reply to this email to let us know if you will pay just $1,500.00 or not for us to refrain or not from ruining your precious website & business permanently. Also if you ignore this email and do not reply to this email within the next 24-48 hours, then we will go ahead and build 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks pointing directly to your website.
We are awaiting your wise decision.
RS
———– End of Extortion e-mail ————-
Interestingly enough, the letters RS supposedly stand for Rannvijay Singh which may or may not be a real person.
Later on the same day, I received exactly the same form e-mail (word for word) from a different extortionist that used this other e-mail address of issmt1@yahoo.com
So I’d like to share a few thoughts and impressions with both of these people.
1. Since there are 2 of you, does that logically mean that you are threatening to send me a total of 40,000 spammy links?
2. Does this also mean that I need to send each one of you $1,500 each ($3,000 total) in order for you to refrain or not from ruining my precious website & business permanently? (as you put it in your threat)
In order for this lame type of threat to work, you must be the type of person who is easily motivated by fear.
Fortunately, I have never been motivated by fear or by any type of threat. That is the first reason this type of threat will fail. These form letter e-mails are likely sent out to the masses with hopes of finding at least a few people who will cringe in fear and send in their money.
Oh yes, another follow up e-mail just came in…. which asks me…
“What did you decide ?”
So for the sake of a response, I’ll tell you that there never was any possibility of me paying money to either extortionist.
I will be monitoring our links very closely in case either one of these people actually attempts to make good on their threats.
It certainly won’t be hard to remove your spammy links using Google’s disavow tool.
Finally, I’ll give you one more reason that you are bound to fail. This has to do with your attempt to hide behind your anonymous names and e-mail addresses.
In this world, there is no one who is truly anonymous.
There is someone who is much higher than I that is watching you and watching the works of your hands, and there is nothing that escapes His attention.
At the end of life’s journey, do you really want to answer to God for your choices of how you attempted to prey on others?
Believe it or not, I am praying to God that you come to your senses before you do any damage to yourselves or anyone else.
For my final word on money, you’ve likely heard it said that “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Anyone who “loves” money more than they love God or more than they love people has a bigger problem than they realize.
We at the Search Engine Academy remain committed to teaching our attendees the full scope of white hat SEO.
Check out all of our September SEO Workshop dates here.
Nice job John.
I thought GOLF was the root of all evil?
Cheers,
Ron
A perfect response to these extortionists, John! God bless you.
Thank you Duane for your comment. Blessings back to you my friend.
Best wishes,
John Alexander
Thanks for posting this.
The concept of a ‘Google Bomb’ has been around a while – this when someone else can damage your online rankings with bad linking. For the most part, these threats are a complete hoax – it’s just too much work to carry out the threat. How many email are they blasting out? What if his email went to your spam box and you never read them? Would a person like this have an organized way to follow-up on all the treat email?
But let’s consider what might happen if they did follow up on the threat – would the ‘disavow links’ component of Google Webmaster Tools help to clean up?
And another question – it is easy to ‘buy backlinks’ from sellers on Fiverr and other places – could an unethical person use this strategy to actually harm a competitors websites?
Thanks again,
Doug
Hi Douglas,
Thank you for your comments. I tend to agree with you that these attacks are being made on a number of Web sites
but time will tell whether there ever really was a threat. I’ll be watching for anything unusual, but I expect
these types of scams are largely targeting the fearful to try and make a quick buck.
Best wishes,
John Alexander
Good one John… never heard of that.
To Ron Castle – thanks for the references, my friend, and for all your past help!
Nice summary and response John. The best part was at the end where you directed them to your upcoming workshops. Keep an eye out for any new registrations that come in from either of these emails. LOL
Thanks Jeff,
Don’t worry, I’ll be watching. :o)
Best wishes,
John Alexander
People are sick, John.
You are right, Gail. There are some pretty strange types out there
but overall, I’ve been very pleased with the comments coming in
from our long term students and readers.
I’ve heard from quite a few (many writing me privately) to both thank
me for this post and many just letting me know what difference our
training has made to their success.
No worries – if anything, I’m very encouraged by the notes from our
readers.
Wishing you the very best, Gail,
John Alexander
Hey John
This was an interesting read. By the way I wish to tell you that the best thing I ever did was subscribe to your free newsletter and just putting in action a few of your suggestions ( not all only about 8 to 10 ) has made a huge difference to ou Seo and we are on page 1 for couple of months now.
The only thing we can’t seem to improve is our page rank. We haven’t attended any of your workshops. A Big thank you to you to help out with v useful suggestions in your newsletter that work. A Real big thanks.
Hello Kamlesh,
Thank you for taking time to write to me. I am delighted to hear that you have experienced some success by following my free SEO tips. It’s surprising sometimes what a big difference can be made with only minor changes.
There is a good reason why you are struggling with where your page ranks. Many people can fail to realize that everyone’s place is influenced by the personalization of search. This means that everyone’s rank can be different depending on who it is searching. If you ever do get a chance to come to one of our hands-on SEO Mastery workshops, we go into a great deal of training on how to deal with this for exactness and accuracy.
You’ll see it covered on Day 2 of the 3 Day Advanced SEO Mastery Workshop:
https://www.searchengineacademy.com/workshops/advanced-seo-class#day1
Here is a list of authorized Search Engine Academy dates and locations:
https://www.searchengineacademy.com/dates
In the meantime, keep reading the SEO tips and I wish you the very best of success my friend.
Best wishes,
John Alexander
Founder and Director of Training
http://SearchEngineAcademy.com