Wednesday 9 February 2011

Not for sale

    My afternoon was enlivened today by an email popping up in my inbox offering to buy this blog.
    Wow, I thought, I've joined Ariana Huffington, hold on a minute while I get the wheelbarrow for all that cash!
    Sadly for me though, the sender was not AOL. Instead it was a spam search engine optimisation company wishing to buy my little piece of the Internet for its well-written keyword-heavy content and for its meagre standing in the search engines. For this I would receive about three hundred dollars, and then I would sit back and watch my creation covered with spammy meaningless links to the spammers customers. My work destroyed, my readers abandoned, and the search engines temporarily polluted.
    Not a chance.
    What my spammer correspondent doesn't know is that in a past life I spent a lot of time helping one of his targets detect and beat the tactics he is attempting to employ. I regard search engine spammers as the low-lives of my industry and would rather do anything than enter into any form of business arrangement with one of them.
    So it looks as if our little corner of the internet is being looked at by these people. If you get an "I want to buy your blog" email, just ignore it. Even if you did try to sell it it'd doubtful whether you'd see any cash, these people operate on the edges of what is legal so I'd not expect them to be trustworthy when it came to payment.

6 comments:

  1. My blog is worth too much and if they have to ask how much I'd say, 'If you need to ask how much you cannot afford me!' It isn't only on the Internet either, I hate spammers anywhere! They ought to get a life.

    Shirley Anne xxx

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  2. I've received similar offers in the past, and instinctively wanted nothing to do with them. I'm always suspicious of deals that come out of the blue.

    Melissa XX

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  3. $300 you say! wonder if mine is worth as much?

    Perhaps not, not even been offered a dollar!

    Oh well...

    Caroline XXX

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  4. I'm fairly sure that if I chose to put Adsense pay-per-click ads on this blog I could equal their price. (I don't because the US tax authorities reserve the right to levy tax on adsense payments generated by sites hosted on US-based infrastructure - like Blogger. Not worth the hassle for only a few $.)

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  5. Interesting, Jenny. Halle was just doing some house cleaning on T-Central and thought we might have been hacked. She found a blog in our listings that had nothing to do with being trans. It has since been deleted, thanks to our eagle-eyed girl, but I wonder if this was originally a legit blogger who sold out.

    For the record, I have not received this email asking about any of my blogs, including TC.

    Calie xxx

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  6. It is certainly possible that the blogger sold out. Or that their blog was hacked.

    There are so many abandoned blogs out there I guess it wouldn't be difficult for blackhats to find ones with weak passwords.

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