| Reputational damage in spam scam |
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| on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 |
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There's a cyclone bearing down on Queensland's coast at the moment. It is unlikely to hit Brisbane, (and as it is maybe 1500 kms away and covering 96 kms per day, could be some time before we know), but if it hits land some insurance companies will suffer large losses. Cyclones aren't the only thing that can damage an insurance company, because the basis of insurance is trust. Take the trust away and an insurer has nohing left. So one wonders what sort of insurance company would employ the following tactic. Sunday a week ago I received an email from someone calling themselves Allison who allegedly works for New England Studies. Try Googling it, or copying and pasting "www.newenglandstudies.org" into your browser address bar - they don't appear to exist. They were kindly letting me know that they were doing research for a "Climatology professor" and found a link in an article on On Line Opinion was broken. "Allison" suggested I might like to replace that link with this one www.realinsurance.com.au/Article-Library/Taking-Action-on-Climate-Change.aspx. Have a look at the link. It is sort of pertinent, but not really, the explanation is low quality and has very little to do with the direct business of Real Insurance. What appears to have happened here is that Real Insurance has been convinced they need some smart SEO and part of the strategy involves building a reference library and then getting as many links to it as they can. But instead of building a library of such high quality that it will get linked to organically the person doing the SEO has fraudulently gone to organisations like On Line Opinion who publish genuinely high quality material to try to con us into linking to them. This approach wouldn't have been cheap, and while it was better disguised than the usual approach, was still relatively easy to spot, so completely ineffective. One cowboy link wouldn't have damaged On Line Opinion's reputation too much as it has around 17,000 outbound links, the link could hurt a smaller site. But one thing is for sure, it's damaged Real Insurance's reputation. (BTW, if you're wondering why none of the references to the insurance company is a link, that's deliberate - they're after links, so why reward them, even if you are cricitising them).            |