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Once your site has enough traffic, you will receive automated guest blogging requests. These are sent out automatically by software programs, which scan sites looking for contact forms and which automatically fill them out and submit the message.
By the time you reach this point, you’ll also be getting real guest post requests from actual people, so at first it may be tricky to tell the difference between the two. What we’re going to do here is take a look at a typical spam guest posting request and point out the features that make it spammy so you can spot them in the future. Cool? Cool.
Here is an email I received just today (and which prompted this post):
I am Stewart, a member of a financial community. I just visited your site “remarkablogger.com” and trust me you are doing a great job for your site. I found such uniqueness and worth reading values. The quality of your content is excellent.
I would love to write financial articles and contribute for your site. I can give you an original guest post related to refinancing, personal finance, credit advice, short term loan, budgeting, make money, mortgages, small business
or whatever topic you suggestI can become my link partner and exchange contextual links.
Please let me know your thoughts. We have many good financial sites from where we can provide you links from the content pages or by doing article exchanges.If your are not the concerned person, please forward the mail to the Web-master concerned.
Thanks and Regards
These awful pieces of shit always follow the same formula. Once you know the formula you can spot these a mile away:
- Introduce themselves as part of an industry completely unrelated to your site.
- Say they just visited your site with a cut-and-paste URL, which is a complete lie: their crawler visited your site, they personally did not.
- Offer praise which is generic enough to apply to any possible site and which of course is meaningless.
- Propose a guest post that is “original” and about a topic completely unrelated to your blog or “whatever topic you suggest.”
The stuff in this one about exchanging links doesn’t always appear in these sorts of emails. I’m so curious about how he “becomes his link partner,” I’m tempted to reply to him just to get a reaction out of him about this. Surely, evil sorcery is involved!
The first time you get one of these, unless you know what to look for, you may not recognize it as a “robo-email” because how do you know this isn’t just the dry, lifeless writing style of a real person? After you get more of them you may see the pattern, but hey, why not be able to spot them before you ever get one?
What to Do about Spammy Guest Post Request Emails
Most often you’ll get these because automated software is filling out your site’s contact form and submitting it. The problem with attempts to combat this is that they make your contact form more of a pain in the ass for real people: by making them type in CAPTCHA codes or check boxes or solve math problems to prove they’re human, you’re punishing THEM just so YOU don’t receive spam. To my way of thinking this is not the way to go.
Unfortunately all the research I’ve done into a solution for this has turned up nothing but complex PHP or .htaccess scripting solutions that you can’t implement unless you’re a bit of technical wizard.
In other words, I’m sorry to say you just have to put up with the spam in order to make life easier for some very important people: your customers.
NEVER REPLY TO THESE EMAILS. You’d think that doesn’t need to be said but in my experience there’s no such thing as “goes without saying.” Call me Captain Obvious all you like: it’s a title I wear with pride!
It may not be a good idea to mark them as spam, either, because the server which actually sent the email is your own! Remember, it was your contact form on your site that was filled out and the message was sent from your hosting.
So, in the end, all you can do (for now, until a better solution comes along) is delete these emails.
Such terrible first world problems we have!
Do you get these “robo-emails?” Have you ever gotten one that’s particularly funny or replied back? Share your experiences in the comments below!
