Often, you may receive unsolicited emails such as this:  

Hi website.co.nz,

My name is Alex, I’m a Search Specialist and was doing research for another client when I came across your site.  

I wanted to share a few major issues I discovered that are currently harming your website search rankings:

• There are several ‘bad’ links pointing to your website. You can confirm this by searching your website on the major search engines search boxes – Google, Yahoo & Bing. You can simply search by inputting your link: website.co.nz
• Your website has multiple undesirable technical errors such as HTML errors, broken links, missing image alt tags etc. Confirm this by searching your domain or website URL on validator.w3.org,brokenlinkcheck.com,feedthebot.com/tools/alt/
• Duplicate content has been found which can be adversely affecting your website. You can confirm this at copyscape.com
• The number of high quality and/or authoritative links pointing to your site is extremely low. You can confirm this by visiting ahrefs.com

We can help you fix these issues and get your website ranking on the 1st page of Google!

Let me know if you are interested and I’ll send you a proposal with our prices, SEO strategy for website.co.nz, and results we have achieved for other clients. Sounds interesting? Feel free to ask questions or you can provide your phone number for me to call you.

Kind Regards,

Alex Lew

Search Specialist

Don’t fall for this gimmick

Often, these emails are designed to trick recipients into believing that they come from legitimate companies, or are tied up with technology giants like Google.  They might even try to pass themselves off as an affiliate of Zeald.     

It is important to know that you must, at all cost, ignore emails of this nature.  As a matter of fact, dealing with these unscrupulous companies can be detrimental to your business.

How to spot an email scam

• Email scams normally come unsolicited via email from companies you have never heard of before, or websites you are not subscribed to.  
• The email is usually sent from a free, non-professional email address (e.g. @gmail.com).  
• Most of the time, the email does not contain the company’s website, or any contact information.  
• There’s no company name.  If it does, it usually doesn’t show up in a Google search.  
• The email is rife with blatant typographical errors.  
• It doesn’t have personalisation, and often contain vague or inaccurate information about your company.