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Earlier today, I posted about spam received in a blog comment that was clearly posted by an actual person. In that post, I mentioned tracking down (not hard in this case) and calling the company that appeared to be behind the spam, Advantage Consulting Services. Surprisingly, "V. Patel" called me back.

I told him I was interested in their company's product and started off just asking him questions about SEO in general, followed by some leading questions about how linking might affect pagerank (hint hint). CentreSource deals quite a bit with SEO, though with legitimate "white-hat" vendors (naturally), so I had a fair idea of what I could ask to probe for nefarious practices, but he pretty much kept it legit. Eventually I cut to the chase and explained why I was really calling, I asked him if he spammed the blog. To my further surprise, he said yes, and that he was "sorry". Yeah, well, I'm sorry too, pal.

The company name is Advantage Consulting Services (www.acsseo.com redirects to this URL). The website is actually a nice-looking website, and it comes across as being a legitimate SEO company (of which there are many). What's even funnier is that they have an entire section devoted to ethics, where they note:

We recognize that your website represents both your integrity and ours - and we strive to give you the best results while maintaining the highest of industry principles. We use industry best practices and ethical standards to ensure that your search engine optimization and marketing processes are achieved through honest means.

It doesn't get much more ironic than that, folks. "Your Integrity Is Your Integrity", they say at the top. I wonder how "Abrams California Health Insurance" might feel about the "ethics" involved in Advantage Consulting Services spamming on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, nowhere in their Processes page do they mention comment spamming.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so infuriating.

The transcript of our conversation is below. It's not terribly exciting -- I was admirable in keeping my composure while finding ways at the end to say "spam is bad" without swearing. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new friendly face of the comment-spam inundating your blog, "V. Patel":

Hi Chris, my name is V. Patel?

Yes..

I got a message from you?

Yeah, I have a question for you..

Uh huh..

The company you work for.. you guys do SEO? search engine optimization?

yes we do..

Can you tell me a little bit about the techniques that you guys use?

Ah.. what is this in regarding, or ..? If you don't mind..

Ah, well.. I was just curious about your product

Ah, okay, um.. It pretty much varies, you know, uh.. it depends what type of site, what they're looking for, and uh.. there's a lot of different things we do..

Ok..

A lot of times ah pay-per-click content-writing, uhm.. just a lot of different various things..

Do you guys do the actual optimization on the web code as well? Like if we had a website we could deliver the code and you'll optimize it for search engines and stuff?

yes we do..

Okay.. Is that just to generally raise the google page rank and stuff like that?

Ah, no, it's mainly to help increase the traffic. Uh, Google Pagerank is pretty much just an arbitrary number, you know, it's a 10.. if you notice, you know, it's all depending on who links to you and how many links you have which affects the pagerank.. but.. and a lot of sites you'll see that sites with greater contact and better optimized code have better rankings than sites with higher pagerank..

Right.. As far as the linking back and forth.. do you guys do anything to take advantage of that?

Uhm, what do you mean, back and forth?

Well, say that a site links to my website.. would that improve my page ranking?

It does, to some extent, not always.. It's pretty complicated, but it depends on relevance and a lot of those other types of factors..

Right.. Well, let me ask you a question.. The reason that I called was because my website runs a blog.. and I just recently got a comment submitted to it that was a link to a healthcare company. The comment was of no relevance to the actual post that it was on.. making it, in effect, comment spam. And the email address that was left was vpatel@acsseo.com. Was that you or was that someone spoofing you?

Uhm.. that could have been me .. if you can tell me the URL?

The URL is chris.quietlife.net

c-h-r-is.. dot .. quiet...

quietlife.net ... You won't see the comment because I already deleted it. It came from an IP address in Irvine, California.

That .. yeah, that could have been me, I'm sorry about that. It won't happen again, but..

Is that a standard practice in your company?

Ah.. ... no not really, we do post on comments sometimes, ah... we probably post like two three comments every couple weeks? so..

Okay..

but yeah i am sorry about that..

Okay, alright, well, I would make a suggestion that your company avoid that in the future -- especially tying it back to your company's actual name, because most people consider it to be rude, and ah.. consider it to be spam, so, I mean, tying your company's name could be pretty disastrous, I would imagine.. as far as your reputation.

Yeah.

Alright. Thank you very much.

No problem.

*CLICK*