It doesn’t happen any more, but back in the day, a piece of SEO spam would occasionally sneak through the corporate mail filters. Here’s an excerpt from one. (Long version)
We had gone through your website: www.microsoft.com Would you be interested in a possible Website Designing and Search Engine – SEO of the site or additional features that might benefit the overall usability and user experience which usually leads to better sales. Google’s research data shows over 85% of people search for your products/services through search engines and buy as well. These statistics also influence other channels and buying medium as well.
your [sic] website is not on first page on Google for most of the relevant and user oriented keywords pertaining to your domain so I was wondering if you would be interested in getting Search engine optimization done for your website.
Yes, those styles are taken from the original, which may give you some sort of idea what results to expect. (Maybe they honed their skills on GeoCities.)
It’s funny that they send their pitch to large multinational corporations, as if those corporations don’t have an entire department devoted to maintaining and optimizing the corporate Web site. Maybe I should ask for a quote?
Funnier would be is if they had sent the same spam to Google. (Anybody from Google want to confirm? Were you tempted to write back?)
Here’s another.
While studying your website I couldn’t help noticing it lacked any significant ranking in Google.
I think that already hurts their position. Apparently, they are not very good at studying Web sites, if they came to the conclusion that microsoft.com has no significant ranking in Google.
Oh, very similar to one I got two weeks ago offering me help to secure an internship at a leading technology company. The very one I already work for! And they knew that of course because they used my work email with that company’s name in the address.
This could make sense if their analysis included how many broken links to pages on microsoft.com there are on the rest of the web.
To be fair, they did offer to help improve the site’s usability and it certainly can not be argued that Microsoft’s website has very good UI/UX. ¬_¬
Nowadays I get this on LinkedIn.
I thought this was pretty funny but decided to test it and maybe these guys were right lol.
My search terms on google were “operating system for pc” and “best operating system”.
Microsoft didn’t show up on the first page for the first one and was really low for the latter.
On bing the results were the same. In fact bing recommends a bunch of linux distros.
Maybe take these guys up on there offer!
Search engines are slowly but steadily being overcome by content farms. Quite often in the first 10 results, 8 or 9 go to such pages. You can recognize them easily because of the sheer amount of advertisements, and the tacky generic looking text.
Agreed. I searched “best operating system for pc” on Bing and microsoft.com is not within the first 25 pages of results!