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.