I am involved in a joint venture with one of my close friends, Glenn Ansley. It’s the World’s Best Event Calendar Plugin for WordPress (in my humble opinion). Well, if you have a website, you know you’re going to get typical SPAM through your contact form, from so-called “SEO Experts”. We received one the other day that I thought was especially compelling, so much so that I decided to reply to him. Here is the brief email exchange…

Name: Carson White

Email: carsonwhite@sti-creative.com

Comments: Hi,

We carried out a preliminary analysis on your website and discovered the following areas of concern.
1.    Your website attracts limited traffic, which affects potential sales.
2.    Your keywords don’t feature in Google first page, which affects visibility.
3.    Your back links are not good enough, which affects link popularity.
4.    Your website is not properly promoted, which affects the overall score.
We are a Search Engine Optimization service provider and can assist you in overcoming the above mentioned problems. We can perform a more detailed analysis on your website and provide you the plan of action of how we can promote the same.

Please let us know if you require the SEO REPORT on your website at no cost.

Best Regards,
Carson
Systems Technology International Inc.
Michigan: 39555 Orchard Hill Place, Suite 461, Novi, Michigan-48375
New York: 9921 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11209
www (dot) sti-cs (dot) com

Notice: Under The Bill 1618 Title iii passed by the 105th US Congress this mail may not be considered SPAM as long as the contact information is included and a method to be removed from our mailing list stated. If you are not interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with REMOVE in the subject line and your ID will be removed from our mailing list. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.

And my reply…

Hi Carson,

I’ve carried out a preliminary analysis of your email and discovered the following areas of concern.
1.    You think we are suckers.
2.    You most likely implement black-hat “SEO” services that end up hurting companies, rather than helping them.
3     You probably over charge your clients for a service that none of them need. Google actually does a pretty good job of figuring out what is important and what isn’t… without people trying to game the system.
4.    You emailed us about our site not ranking well, but how do you explain finding our site?
5.    The bill S.1618 Title III was passed by the Senate, but was not passed by the House. It takes both the House and the Senate to pass a law. Furthermore, a similar bill, H.R. 3888 was passed by the House, but was not passed by the Senate, thus and again, not making it law. Therefore, your email is SPAM.

We are intelligent human beings and can assist you in overcoming the above mentioned problems. We can help develop a training in ethics, philosophy, and logic and provide you with a plan of action of how to stop SPAMMING and SCAMMING innocent businesses.

Please let us know if you require these lessons at much cost.

Best Regards,

Lew Ayotte
Full Throttle Development, LLC
http://fullthrottledevelopment.com
http://twitter.com/full_throttle
http://twitter.com/lewayotte

For some reason he never replied.

Today was the College of Education’s 2nd Annual Chili Cook-Off. I got to eat six very tasty chili recipes. I just got an email with a list of the winners for the cook-off and I got a pretty good chuckle at the 3rd place prize.

I hope it’s as magnificent as I’ve been imagining… And yes, I did vote for the winner.

Ok, so I’m going to throw a little caption contest! Kati took this picture this afternoon and I thought it deserves a funny caption, but I have no idea what it should be! If you win, I’ll mail you a Powered by WordPress t-shirt (blue / medium) if you want. Otherwise you’ll just get the glory of winning a caption contest!

What is my caption?

I woke up this morning and saw that someone had commented on one of my older posts… Tough Times Among the Church

My heart goes out to this “poor man from the African region”… but I just cannot approve this comment :).