waffle

Matt Gemmell writes about “Cylon”, some black hat (read: morally corrupt and unscrupulous) “SEOs”. I say “SEO” in quotes because SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and applying that label to this kind of stuff is kind of like swapping out the chicken in a chicken sandwich for feces, and then calling it a “slight condiment-related reconfiguration”. Real, honest SEO with sustainable and predictable results consists in its entirety of writing good content and not hiding it inside crap designed to fool search engine indexers into giving you credit you don’t deserve that will be shortly revoked.

Cylon buys domains off of people and store ads on them. The domains they want to buy have a high PageRank (a lot of Google Juice), no doubt pent-up through steady delivery of actual useful or at least honest content. Then they put links on them. If you imagine a company that would buy out any shop whatsoever in a mall (with, I must press, the consent of the shopkeeper), retain the same entrance and replace the interior with a busy place full of the worst kind of pushy, seedy salesmen, that’s roughly equivalent to what Cylon does on the web.

Cylon and their ilk are the worst kind of companies doing business that could be classified as legal on the web. They are completely killing the utility of the web in order to push ads so that they don’t actually have to get a real job, doing real and constructive things. They are the worst kind of immoral.

Yesterday (or today, depending on how you count), Cylon, in what must amount to a mass mailing, contacted me and wanted to buy wafflesoftware.net. Below is the mail I received:

From: Robert Brown bbrown@cyl0n.com
Subject: I will pay 1000 USD for wafflesoftware.net website right now, payable today.

Hi,

We are looking to potentially immediately buy your website. It must meet the following criteria:

Minimum Google PR: 3

Be in one of the following categories:
– Canadian focus
– finance
– cars
– telecommunications
– travel

Provable earnings history of some sort, even if its not a lot.
Provable traffic record for the past 12 months.

If you have one or more websites that meet this criteria, please email me and let me know the website address, the $ amount of earnings over the past 12 months, the average monthly unique visitors for the past 12 months, and your prefered payment method (generally paypal, check, or escrow.com), and I will get back to you later today to confirm whether or not we can purchase your site for $1000. We have some amount of flexibility in our criteria, and if you are close we may be able to buy your site, but perhaps for less $. Feel free to email me with any questions you have.

Thanks!

Robert Brown
(480) 368-2585

Also, I apologize if you receive this email more than once. Due to some data complications, I may have sent it out to you multiple times on accident. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The email it was sent to was the WHOIS contact. The “data complications” and “criteria” are Cylon not only shitting all over the internet but also scraping the WHOIS database and spamming me in order to make this offer, and asking me to please not be upset if I’m spammed twice.

Dear Cylon: I’d appeal to your sense of decency if I didn’t know you’ve arranged to have it surgically removed. Since I know it’s not there, my answer is “no”. Stop beating the useful parts of the web to death so you can make a few dollars without contributing anything useful to society.