Spam Reply

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I received the following email, the name has been removed to prevent free advertising:

To the owner of Cecilian Society - Glasgow, Scotland,
Hi! I like your site. 

To introduce myself, my name is Jason Smith and I work for a business called ******** . 
We specialise in driving targeted new business to UK web sites like yours. We find that 
search engines are the most cost-effective way of getting new lead s to your site. 

I have run a free ranking report for your site "Cecilian Society - Glasgow, Scotland"  
to give you an idea of how easily customers can find your site at the moment. (See below). 

Matches on AOL UK
      Search Rank Page 
      cecilian society - glasgow, scotland 1 - 10. No listings! You're missing traffic! [View Results] 
      arts humanities glasgow 3. The University of Glasgow :: Arts and Humanities Graduate School [View Results] 
      cecilian society - glasgow, scotland 11 - 20. No listings! You're missing traffic! [View Results] 
      arts humanities glasgow 11 - 20. No listings! You're missing traffic! [View Results] 

Matches on Altavista UK
....

Matches on Google
....

Matches on MSN
....

We would like to help you get more visitors on your site and drive sales. We have automatic 
internet marketing solutions starting at just £9.50! For more information, please check out 
our web site at *******.

Kind regards,
Jason Smith
Business Development Manager
******* - The Leaders in Online Leads. 

So he was basically saying that we were not mentioned in the main search engines. I checked up on this and replied:

Dear Jason,

Thank you for your kind email. Naturally I was concerned that we were not
mentioned on the 'top' search engines so I immediately investigated for
myself.

1. AOL UK - Whilst in general we do not think highly of AOL we appreciate
that some people may choose to use it for searches. +Cecilian +Society
provided as the top result the web page of one of our members. His web
page is intended as an extension to our own and links directly.

+cecilian +society +glasgow provided in the top results at least 5 pages
which link directly to ours.

2. Altavista UK - A search in 'UK only' provides in the top results a
number of sites which link directly to ours. A worldwide search has as the
top result the website of our President which links directly to ours. I
have since submitted our site for inclusion to AltaVista.

3. Google - My search provided as the first result our own site (this was
using 'cecilian society' or 'cecilian' or indeed 'cecilian society
glasgow'. Curiously even in the search results to which your email linked,
we were still top.

4. MSN - My search provided once again as the first result, our own site.

I chose to ignore 'arts humanities glasgow' as, to the best of my
knowledge, I have yet to meet anyone that would consider using that as a
search pattern.

The upshot of all this is that we seem to already have a fairly impressive
presence in the world; a testament, no doubt, to my genius and the
dedication of our members.

However your email has prompted me to change my keywords to be more
suitable. Unfortunately we read our email through a telnet window under
UNIX. As such we are unable to read HTML, therefore if you could send your
spam in a text format in future it would make it considerably easier to
read.

Yours Sincerely,

Ewan Maclean
Cecilian Society Web Editor.