I’ve had enough of our site being targeted by unethical SEO spammers who leave comment link spam in the comments on our forum. It breaches our forum rules, and it takes time to clean-up, which is a real cost.

This isn’t just some junk generated by robots and scripts. You have to register to be on our forum, so a human has to be involved. In fact, many of these spammers register and then lie low for weeks before they post their spam, just so they look more ridgy didge than your average spammer. This is “high quality” spam.

So who are these clients?

Well I’ve decided to keep a list, and I intend to draw the attention of organisations like Google to it. They need to penalise the companies that do this sort of thing.

We ask spammers to pay a fee for us having to clean up their graffiti. So far, surprise, surprise, none of them have paid up, even when they’ve made an undertaking to.

So, here is the list from just the last week.

• Pivot Institute (The spammer, who uses a Google email address, so has little credibility, promised to pay the invoice. The principal of the organisation, Elisa Uyen, scolded me for even raising the issue! )
• A E Soliman and Associates (Sent them an email, but to date no response)
• MyImportLabel

If you paid someone in offline life to go around and graffiti people’s walls with your brand, you would be liable to the cost of taking it down. I think the same thing is true of online forums, but no doubt, should it go to court, there will be an argument as to whether the spammer was authorised, and if he was, to what extent the principal ought to be responsible.

We need legislation to make it clear that the principal is responsible, and that they cannot rely on the spammer being an independent agent to avoid their responsibility.

Here is the email trail from ‘Asjad Afzal’, on the basis of this, one of life’s crooks that you would hope never to have to meet in face to face life.

Email trail: