NZ Skeptics Articles

SEO Silliness

Mark Honeychurch - 3 March 2025

Search Engine Optimisation (known as SEO) is an IT discipline in which a website owner attempts to optimise their site in a way that makes it appear high up in google’s search results, ideally on the first page. The factors that Google considers when ranking pages, through an algorithm called PageRank (and more recently other technologies), are something of an open secret these days.

Since the early days of eCommerce, people have been trying to ensure their websites have good SEO, ensuring they generate as much business as possible through Google searches - and Google is a channel that has always been important for sales, because Google continues to have a dominating market share of the internet search market, and people overwhelmingly use search as a way to find where to buy products online.

So, given that many business owners are willing to pay good money to ensure their businesses rise to the top of the Google search rankings, it’s no surprise that these days a portion of the global spam email traffic is dedicated to trying to convince people to purchase SEO services. A few weeks ago I started receiving emails to an NZ Skeptics email address about one of our websites, articles.skeptics.nz - a development website where I’m testing out an import of all of our articles from various sources, going right back to our inception in 1986. The first email said:

Dear,

I hope you’re doing well!

At ZiFTechnologies, we know how important high-quality backlinks are for improving website authority, driving organic traffic, and increasing brand visibility.

After reviewing your website,[ articles.skeptics.nz ] I noticed an opportunity to strengthen your backlink profile and boost your SEO performance.

To help you achieve this, we’re excited to offer a 30% discount on bulk guest posting orders as part of our Celebration of Life Day special. It’s a great chance to grow your online presence while saving money!

Why choose ZiFTechnologies for your guest posting needs?

Premium Backlinks: Placements on high-authority websites.

SEO-Optimized Content: Unique, Google-friendly articles tailored to your niche.

Permanent Do-Follow Links: Long-term benefits for your site’s credibility and SEO.

Proven Expertise: Over 3 years of experience in delivering quality link-building results.

This offer is available for a limited time, so don’t miss out! Stronger backlinks mean more traffic, better rankings, and improved online credibility.

📩 Reply to this email or contact us at 📞 +447765666583 to secure your discount and discuss your needs.

Let’s work together to take your online presence to the next level!

Best regards,

Shahid

SEO Agency ZiFTechnologies

📞 +447765666583

So, what’s Shahid offering? Firstly, he’s offering to place links to our website on other websites that are ranked highly by Google. Google’s core search relies on a system called PageRank, where it tries to rank pages based on both their relevance to the search terms people use, and the popularity of those pages. Part of a page’s popularity is calculated based on what other pages link to the page in question, and what pagerank those pages have. So, Shahid will link to our articles from other websites, effectively trying to fool Google into thinking our articles are more important than they would otherwise be legitimately considered.

Secondly, he’s offering SEO-optimised content - pages that we can add to our articles website that would increase the number of visits to our site. Given that the site is a repository of all the articles written for the NZ Skeptics, it seems both that we have enough content for the site already, and that any new content really should come from our members rather than what would likely be an AI that’s been trained to write content that can integrate a list of keywords when supplied with one, with little regard for veracity or reading enjoyment. We’re not interested in driving more people to our site, because we’re not selling anything. We’re simply interested in making sure that people find our articles when they’re looking for factual information on a topic. And stuffing our website with irrelevant or keyword-stuffed articles isn’t going to help that, it’s only going to harm it.

The third list item, “do-follow” links, is weird. There’s no such thing as a dofollow option for a URL in a webpage, just a nofollow. The nofollow option for a link tells search engines not to use the link in their page ranking calculations. So, for example, if we wanted to link from the NZ Skeptics website to a homeopath’s website, we’d want to add a nofollow to the link to avoid the homeopathy site gaining kudos from our link. It seems that a “dofollow” link is just a link (or tag) that doesn’t have a nofollow or similar option set (there’s also noopener and noreferrer, which both control what information the linked to website sees about the originating website).

Finally, the “3 years of experience” seems a little thin on the ground. Maybe in 2005 having 3 years of experience was a flex, but not in 2025. Of course, maybe this is a company run by recent Computer Science graduates who have decided that SEO is their passion and learned the dark arts in short order. So, just to be sure, I checked out their website. The front page looks nice and shiny, but sadly every other page beyond that gives a 404 not found error. The About Us page, list of Services, Blog, Contact page - all of them just return an error. And they don’t even print out the error gracefully - they plaster it over the website’s main menu, in an absolutely positioned div.

This kind of mess doesn’t fill me with confidence that this company has any idea what it’s doing. If these guys can’t even look after a very simple Wordpress site, I’m not sure I’d want to trust them with any of the NZ Skeptics’ websites - even if their services were free!

After three emails from Shahid that all looked a lot like the one above, I took the bait and responded:

Hi Shahid,

I’m interested in what your company does - are you able to give me some more details? I’m especially interested in what “high-authority” websites you will be able to use for backlinks, and what kind of articles you’re proposing to write for our niche.

Thanks!

The response sadly didn’t answer either of my questions, about the backlinks and the kinds of articles he’d produce for us. It just read like it was another, shorter, pre-prepared email:

Hi ,

Thank you for reaching out!

…

If you’re looking to build a solid online presence and see measurable improvements in your rankings,

let’s connect and discuss how we can customize our approach to meet your business objectives.

Best regards,

Shahid Jameel

So I doubled down to see if I could get answers to my questions, and maybe finally get him to my name right, rather than starting his emails with “Dear,” or “Hi ,” - after all, I’ve been able to type his name without issues:

Hi Shahid,

We’ve already connected! Are you able to answer my questions from my last email? I’m keen to hear your answers.

Cheers,

mark.

And that was when I realised that I probably wasn’t going to get any sensible answers out of Shahid:

Hi Keen,

I’m reaching out from ZiF Technologies with an opportunity to secure high-quality backlinks for Compgen.

Would you be interested in boosting your site’s authority with our expert link-building services?

I mean, at least he typed a name in the greeting this time - I just wasn’t expecting my response of “I’m keen” to define who I am. I tried one last time, just in case:

Shahid, are you okay? My name’s not Keen, it’s Mark. And I have no idea what Compgen is. I asked a couple of questions in one of my previous emails - are you able to answer them?

Looking forward to your reply!

Cheers,

mark.

At this point Shahid fell back to just spamming me with more introductory emails, repeating the same content in the very first email I received from him. I lamented his inability to follow up on the solid lead I was offering him in my final, pleading email response, but to no avail:

Hi Shahid,

Please, please, please let me buy something from you! I have money here ready to transfer to you in return for your SEO services, but somehow you keep sending me boilerplate emails. I want to be your customer - please let me pay you!

Cheers,

mark.

Sadly, the SEO marketplace is filled with fly-by-night outfits who will promise you the earth but deliver either not much of anything, or potentially worse Google rankings than you had before they started. Many of these tactics are designed to fool Google into thinking your site is something is not, and although this may work in the short term, this kind of black-hat SEO is a cat and mouse game, and sooner or later your attempts to game the system will either stop working or potentially earn you a black listing on Google and a punitive negative weighting to your search engine ranking.

This sad exchange reminds me of an event at work a couple of years ago, when the marketing department at my workplace engaged with an SEO company. After being involved in a couple of meetings with a salesman and one of their SEO experts, I wrote a set of recommendations for my company strongly advising against engaging further with the company, or any other company offering SEO services. In my document, I stressed that “not only do SEO companies often sell a service that is so ill-defined that no measurable improvement can be discerned, but also some of the more duplicitous SEO techniques could damage our Google rankings”, and made a couple of dozen recommendations for how we should strive to improve our SEO ranking without resorting to underhanded tactics. I’ll leave you with just a few of the recommendations, some of which you may find useful if you work with websites: