Today I received some email based spam. Nothing unsual about that in itself, but from a company that was offering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services with a product called DreamSEO, reduced from $30,000 to only $300 per month!

As SEO is part of my business, I thought I’d check out this new competitor. First I searched for the domain the email came from keywordhounddog . biz . No results, so I tried a site: search to find all the pages that google had listed for it, and “answer came there none”.

I even tried to go the the domain directly, stripped of the tacking informmation that keywordhoundog had added (which included the phrase “cattle=…”, suggesting what they think of their customers. Guess what, page could not appear!

Now, would you trust an SEO company that was unable to build a web page, place themselves on google, let alone optimise their own rankings? I think not.

I thought, maybe the spammers are selling pirate editions of DreamSEO without the company’s knowledge. Then I notice a US, toll free number [(800) 408-3413], so I called it, using a free VOIP service. Amazingly, the phone was answered, by “Mike” claiming to be from DreamSEO, but the person whose name was on the spam was unsuprisingly unavailable.