Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!
I considered entitling this post “Phly Phishers Spham Sphinn”, but when I said it out loud, I sounded exactly like Daffy Duck.
The popularity of Danny Sullivan’s new Social Media site Sphinn continues to soar, but with fame comes the agony of massive amounts of spam. My jaw dropped tonight when I found this at the top of the What’s New page:

I hope I will not unjustly accuse any innocent parties in this blog post, but that has got to be one of the spammiest things I’ve ever seen. Stuffed with every possible fly fishing-related keyword known to man, it leaps from the page and gives you a poke in the eye.
The nutty thing about this is, some genius actually took the time to register for Sphinn and submit this post…unless it was completely automated. The other nutty thing is that when you follow the link in the posting, it takes you right to the culprit’s door.
Or does it?
The link goes to bargainflyshop.com (sorry, no way I’m linking out to that directly). It’s a rather hokey website beginning with a good ol’ fashioned splash page. It does, indeed, sell fly fishing equipment. I was thrilled to see it has a contact form. This should enable me to connect up directly to the spammer himself. I took a moment to write to him (or her) and asked why they had dropped such a strange posting in a search engine marketing social media site. I took the time to explain how this wouldn’t help their site’s rankings (if this was their goal) and that it could certainly harm their business, branding them as a disreputable, spamming company. I asked if an SEO or Internet Marketer had advised them to do this, or if they were paying someone to do this for them, and suggested that they end the relationship as quickly as possible, if this was the case.
I explained that I would be blogging about the situation, and requested that they let me know why they had done this. I will gladly add their reply as a follow up to this post, if I hear back from them.
I noticed that the spammer in question had registered with Sphinn under the username ‘searchrankpros’. I’ll skip over the irony of them choosing such an appellation and move forward to my doing a Google search for this name. This could be completely coincidental, but I got a funny feeling when I wound up at searchrankpros.net.
It concerns me when a business selling SEO services has Adsense ads plastered all over their website. It concerns me when a business selling web design services has a different background on each of the pages of their website. Maybe I’m being too hard on Search Rank Pros and they aren’t in any way connected with Bargain Fly Shop’s bizarre attempt to spam Sphinn. Maybe they are just starting out in the business and look funky because of being new to everything. I wouldn’t want to misjudge them.
However, I do want to warn Aaron Wall to look out, because these folks are not only running your SEO Book ads, they are selling their own product called “SEO Book”. Hmmm….
Whoever the guilty spammer is, they simply aren’t good at what they are doing. Black Hat SEOs make big bucks gaming the system in a variety of crafty ways…not by spamming Danny Sullivan with fly fishing posts.
Or have I missed something?
Are the cool SEOs and marketers really into fly fishing? Does the big, nifty fish on Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea mean more than I ever realized? Did a bot notice Rand Fishkin’s posts hitting the front page of Sphinn and think it had struck gold? Did instructions get garbled at Spammy SEO Headquarters:
“No, you idiot, I said phishing, not fishing!”
It all seems pretty fishy to me.