SEO Spammers Using Your Contact From

If your site has a contact form, then odds are you have gotten at least one submission from someone offering his or her search engine optimization (SEO) services. Some of our clients get many. I received this note this morning:

We noticed that you are not at the top of the search engines for a number of your key terms. We have helped companies similar to yours to achieve top organic rankings. Please reply to this message and we will prepare a special proposal for you, to show you how we can achieve similar results for you.

There are many variations on this, but here are some clues to knowing that this is just spam:

1. The message claims that my site is not at the top of the search engines for my "key terms." It is unlikely this person knows my key terms and if so, might recognize that it's unlikely I'll get higher than Amazon, Netflix, or other big players (choose your industry) for key terms that may be similar.
   
2. He says he has helped similar companies but does not name any or cite the success. Carry that further, and if he really did help companies similar to mine, then won't I be competing for the same key terms? And won't this guy reach out to the next competitor of mine and try to resell the same cookie-cutter approach?
   
3. He wants to provide a "special" proposal.
   
4. The email address in the message (which I have excluded) is a Gmail account. It is unlikely that a reputable company will be sending from a Gmail account if it is selling SEO services. Such a company might have an overly-wordy domain name that is chock full of key terms and will be more than willing to use it everywhere possible, including in your contact form.
   
5. These messages usually do not include a phone number, mailing address, and often the email address doesn't match the name of the person claiming to have filled out the form. This means that you cannot even check up on them, let along contact them to tell them to stop spamming your contact form.

I will be writing up some tips on how to use QuantumCMS and the features we've already built into it to help ensure you have the best exposure to the search engines for your content. Hopefully as you read these you will realize just how pointless those SEO spam contact form submissions are.