[Clipart] [Open Clip Art Library] interested in purchasing textlink advertising

[Greg Bulmash]

I didn't reply to the first contact and he followed up.  When I 
responded he offered me $200 to put 1 paragraph of text on three 
different pages of my blog.

This was not random spam.  It's targeted grey-hat SEO.  OCAL's homepage 
has a Google pagerank of 7 and thousands of backlinks.  If it linked out 
to their SEO clients with the right keywords in the links, that could be 
worth a lot of money.

They're not trying to sell OCAL anything.  They're trying to buy 
something... a bit of OCAL's reputation.

And the whole "reply to a spammer and validate your e-mail address" 
thing is so 1999.  Botnet masters have made spamming so cheap, no one 
cares about address quality anymore.

- Greg


Nicu Buculei wrote:
> Greg Bulmash wrote:
>> I got an e-mail with this exact wording, but from a guy.  The offer he 
>> made was lowball, insulting, and would involve me in a grey-hat SEO 
>> scheme that could potentially end in negative repercussions for my 
>> site's Google ranking.
>>
>> I told the guy only an idiot would actually accept his offer.
> 
> It seems you made the mistake to reply to a spammer, thus validating 
> your email address and making you (and probably this list) a sure target 
> for future spam.
>