If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating, unsurprising, and deeply disappointing. Spoiler alert: these folks have bad ethics and want to pay a paltry sum for illegal unethical behavior. It's not even that they think we're willing to do bad things, it's that they think we'll do it for so little.

First contact

My first email came from Ben, an account manager¹ at a marketing company. It wasn't your usual spam email, though it set off some mild alarm bells. I had no intention to actually work with these folks, but I was partway through an 8 hour drive (as a passenger), so I replied—I've gotta entertain myself somehow.

Ben's initial email was sparse on the details, though. It just said it's a "paid collaboration" and didn't name the client, and the post could be about anything. So while I waited for Ben to reply, I looked at the company website again. The sketchiest thing about it was that I couldn't find any of the people, they just didn't seem to exist.

Look, find me a CEO or founder that doesn't have a web presence or at the very least a LinkedIn account. Especially one in a marketing field. That is unrealistic.

The details emerge

It didn't take long for Ben to get back to me. Here's his email, with some cuts and without names².

Thanks for your reply Nicole! We don't have any expectations in terms of reach, it's just a link to any one product or storepage you like from our client's ([CLIENT]) website. Here are more details and examples for the collaboration:

Our client is [CLIENT], formerly known as [SKETCHY-NAME]. [Details of deal site]. This is the site from which we'd like you to link to one relevant product or brand you currently/plan to mention on your blog.

Timeline & Payment

• The budget is $105 USD sent to you in full via PayPal. For payment, please send a PayPal invoice to this email address [BEN'S EMAIL]. Add $4 so we can cover your fees!
• Within one week of payment, include the mention in a blog post that is within two weeks old, and send me the post link.

Link Inclusion

• Include one permanent and do-follow link to your choice of either a store page or a product page (not the homepage).
  • For product page URLs, remove "?run=" and characters following it.
• Make it a natural and seamless fit: without mentioning [CLIENT], add the link to your post using the specific store/brand name or product name as the anchor text.

Examples

[SNIP (other bloggers with posts containing these sketchy links)]

Please let me know if you have any questions or ideas to run by me. I'm looking forward to your thoughts!

Warmly,

[BEN'S NAME]

So this is what they want. Not a real collaboration, but just straight money-for-links. Notably, they want a do-follow link, which means they do not want the "nofollow" or "sponsored" rel attribute on the link. They want search engine crawlers to follow these links and treat them as organic links.

They're buying higher search engine rankings.

This is link spam. It's well outlined in Google's spam policies and if you violate that, you could be removed from Google search results. More generally, it's bad because it deceives readers into thinking this is an organic link.

Perhaps most troubling, they want you to do this without mentioning the client, and presumably without mentioning that you were paid at all. I don't know about you, but usually saying "don't mention you got paid for this" signals to me that it's probably not the right thing to do.

An honest rewrite

I prefer that people are honest about their intentions. It makes things much easier for everyone. Here's what an honest version of Ben's email would have looked like:

Thanks for the reply! We don't have any expectation about reach, because we're not advertising, we're manipulating search rankings. Our client is a division of a big American bank, so they're used to buying influence already!

We'll send you $105 through the sketchiest way possible, PayPal, to make sure you feel like you're getting scammed, because you are!

To get the money, just put a link to our client's shady deal-finding site in one of your blog posts. Make sure to not disclose that it's paid, because that would make us mad, since it wouldn't manipulate search rankings very well.

Here are a few links to other bloggers who've already sold their ethics for shockingly low amounts! Let me know if you have any questions!

- (my name isn't actually) Ben

We probably shouldn't expect that from someone who uses a fake company with fake employees to trick people into doing an unethical thing, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Who's behind this?

We don't know!

I tried to figure out who's behind this, not least of all to report it to the FTC. Ultimately, I couldn't figure it out, but I got some good clues.

When I look at the site for the "company" that "Ben" works for, a few things stand out:

• The employees listed don't exist anywhere else. I'd mentioned this before, but that's really suspicious to me when I can't find anyone on the roster. If I can't find your sales folks, I'll probably assume that they're an LLM these days anyway, but if the whole company doesn't exist, then it's probably a scam.

• The employees' photos are very clearly generated from a model. I'm not going to post them here but there are some of the standard image generation artifacts: someone's ear is missing a piece under her earring; a couple people have double sets of teeth; there's a weird thing going on with the CEO's neck; another has the classic weird psychedelic image model stuff in the corner; and yet another has an earring straight out of a computerized nightmare.

• The site shows it was clearly made for some other scammy site and ripped off here. The sitemap shows last updated times of 2023 for some things, and has someone else's name as the only author.

• The privacy policy is ripped off of another site, and the robots.txt file references a different site's sitemap listed in it. Whoops!

On top of all that, it's running a version of WordPress with vulnerabilities that aren't patched, and a version of OpenSSH that has a remote code execution bug. So maybe they should update their servers?

Our responsibilities when publishing

As people who publish online, we have a responsibility to our readers and to the broader internet community we're part of. There are lots of resources to read about these, and the FTC influence guidelines are particularly good to read in my opinion.

The gist of the matter to me is that as authors, we have (at least) these responsibilities:

• Tell people if you've received payment or have any relationship with a company/product/etc. mentioned. This will let them decide if they want to trust the content or not.

• Make these disclosures obvious and very close to what's being disclosed, so no one can reasonably miss them.

• Follow norms for link attributes, like adding rel="nofollow" if a link is related to a sponsor (or is just outright paid for)

• Do some due diligence on potential partners before you work with them. Make sure it's a company you'd be comfortable working with in public. Also that they, you know, exist.

On top of this, I have a few other guidelines I like to follow for my own work. These are very much personal guidelines, and I don't think they're universal.

• Only publish things you'd publish otherwise. Other than priority, it should be exactly like a normal post: the same style, the same content, just with a prompt that was bumped up by some cash³.

• Make it valuable to your readers. Sponsored posts are ads, in many ways. Some will skip them. Those who don't should be able to get value out of it, whether that's knowledge or entertainment.

• Deal in public only. Don't hide who you deal with, and only work with people you'd be comfortable telling everyone you're working with.

If you have an audience, then you have a lot of responsibility to do right by them. There's a lot of trust placed in us, and we can do a lot of harm if we do bad things for money.

I think that we should be able to make a living off our work. I'd love to make a living off writing articles about silly things I've done with software⁴. But getting there has to be ethical; nothing is worth doing if you can't do it ethically. I'm not selling links, but I am gonna keep responding to some of these folks for the sheer entertainment of it on long drives.