An open letter to a victim of bad SEO

Dear Albert Flotz, owner and operator of,

I own and manage a number of blogs, and was surprised to wake up this morning to find more than 100 spam comments pending on each of these websites, all of which contained backlinks (either directly or indirectly) to your website at

I would never dream of accusing you of doing this yourself. You are probably an innocent victim in this matter. Based on what I know of the SEO industry, I strongly suspect that you saw an ad online for someone who offered to increase your Google rank very quickly for some moderate fee, and you decided to use them to help drive traffic to your little online store.

If you are not an SEO person yourself, you probably don’t understand how they are trying to improve your site’s Google ranking; so please allow me to explain.

Whatever group you hired to do SEO for your site is sending out hundreds of automated comments to blogs and websites all over the net. These comments contain links to ancillary domains that you probably also own, such as When a person clicks on the “buy now” button on these ancillary domains, that person is then directed back to your website at

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to get backlinks to a website by leaving comment on blogs. What I think you need to know, however, is that the group you have hired is doing it VERY BADLY.

For one thing, there is no reason why over 100 automated comments should be left on a single blog in a span of a few hours. This will not be helpful, and because it will be viewed as intrusive and annoying by webmasters, it actually means that these comments are more likely to be blocked and deleted.

For another thing, the content of these comments are garbage, often containing random characters or garbled lists of words. These types of comments not only are easily picked up by spam filters, but even if they get through and are published to the web, Google is likely to detect that they are spam and actually punish your website in their ranking algorithm as a result. So this SEO company that is using these tactics might actually be actively hurting you.

Finally, these comments are being distributed in a completely untargeted way. None of the websites that I manage have anything to do with prescriptions or medical conditions.  Only one of them has a “fitness” section that is in any way related to health. The way that you will get Google to rank your website higher is if these backlinks come from websites that are actually related in some way to the thing you are selling.


So, in conclusion: if you are going to pay a company to spam the internet in order to improve your Google pagerank, at least make sure that they are doing it intelligently. They should be leaving moderate numbers of comments distributed widely across different websites that are all somehow related to health or prescriptions, and the comments themselves should be good, interesting, relevant and readable content.

If the company that you have hired to “improve your Google rank” is not willing or able to do these things, then you really need to ask for your money back.


Greg Stevens

Bad Spam

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  1. Adam says:

    Plus 1. S E ohh no.

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