Live Streaming Sport is run by spammer assholes.
I am redacting this person’s email address, perhaps out of a sense of decency that she and her company don’t display themselves.
I received this email on Aug 3, 2012:
Hi there,
My name is Lucy and I am writing to you from the Livestreamingsport.com outreach team to ask you for your help.
We are currently dealing with a penalty imposed by Google which has resulted in the near de-indexing of Livestreamingsport.com. Google has sent us a warning about excessive link building and have reduced our site’s trust factor to zero, which has in turn unfortunately reduced Google’s share of traffic to our site from 90% to 10%.
We have appealed Google’s decision, but the Google webmaster team continues to demand we remove as many inbound links as we possibly can.
During our full link review, we have come across this link on your site:
(References a link on my wiki of a user account created as a spam link, linking back to her site)
As you can imagine, we are trying to please Google in order to rebuild our site’s trust as quickly as possible, so it would be great if you could help us out.
While this is of course no reflection on your site at all, we would really appreciate it if you could help us remove this link to Livestreamingsport.com.
Essentially, we are trying to start with a clean slate which means we need to remove as many links manually before we can ask Google again to consider us for re-indexing.
Thank you very much for your time and assistance here, we really appreciate it! If we can ever reciprocate the favor in the future we will of course try and help you out too.
Many thanks for your help!
–
Lucy Allen
My reply on Aug 3:
So you spammed my site in order to drive your page rank up, and now that Google has wised up, you want me to remove it?
Lucy again on Aug 4:
Hi John,
We found a number of bad links linking to us and this is just one of them. We did outsource some article promotions some time ago and we believe this is what triggered the penalty as articles were being sent out through a service called uniquearticlewizard and probably others. We have actually come across a number of wiki type links and been able to edit and delete them ourselves but with your site it doesn’t seem possible to do this and this is why I contacted you.
If you can remove the link to our site it would be greatly appreciated!
Best Regards
Me on Aug 4:
So was that a yes?
Lucy again, Aug 7:
Hi Stewart,
Look, we are not here to play games. Yes we did have some promotional work done on our site but if you take a look at most sites, you will see that they too in some form or another have had promotional work done. We made some bad choices in terms of outsourcing work as we are now seeing the full picture and are now tirelessly working on cleaning this issue up. We have to contact a number of webmasters asking if they can remove links to our site which is not a fun process to go through. Most webmasters are very helpful, they remove the links and wish us well, others take a different approach.
We are simply asking webmasters if they can remove links to our site. If you can remove the links, it would be very much appreciated. All that I or other members of my team can do is ask.
Thank you for your time.
Me, Aug 7:
We are simply asking webmasters if they can remove links to our site. If you can remove the links, it would be very much appreciated. All that I or other members of my team can do is ask.
No, you could do much, much more thank just ask. You could:
- Start with a sincere apology for thieving other’s resources in order to artificially inflate your page rank.
- Pledge not to further engage in deceptive business practices.
- If indeed, as you suggest (but don’t actually state), you used a third party marketing organization who created these “bad links”, then call out who it is so when I post this saga on my website, we can assign blame to the correct place.
But that’s what you could start with. In addition, after all of the above, you could also donate $100 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Once you’ve done the items above and you’ve provided proof of such donation, I will comply with your request to update the URL you spammed on my website.
Lucy Aug 7:
John,If you want to remove the spam page from your site or not, it’s up to you. I will no longer be contacting you regarding this matter.
I am sorry for the stress this has caused you and apologise.
$100 to remove the link is simply unrealistic when webmasters at the most ask for $5.
There is obviously a problem with your site because having checked there are thousands of pages such as these; (references a bunch of user accounts created to generate blogspam) . Perhaps it would be an idea to simply remove the wiki feature from your site as this is obviously a big problem.
So we’ve gotten somewhere at least… she admits it’s spam!
What her company has done is seek out open comment forms and wikis and pollute them with spam links back to her site. In the process, she has made money at the expense of harming others.
I have had to effectively shut down my wiki as a result of her actions. The very reason she is unable to now update her spam links is because I had to turn off non-admin editing altogether. This has harmed me, and the people who used to update my wiki.
Shame on you and your company, Lucy.
Shame on you for taking advantage of a loophole in Google’s page rank, and taking advantage of those thousands of us who tried to have a nice little place online for our friends and family to share information.
Shame on you for not taking responsibility for your actions.
And, finally, shame on you for suggesting the problem is with ME because my wiki was abused by YOU. Blaming the victim! I’m sure I was just asking for it, right?
I will keep these links in place in perpetuity, or at least as long as I care to, in the hopes that your site becomes invisible to Google.
Cheers!
