From: iProspect <british.gas@iprospect.com>
Subject: Otherstream: Link Removal Request(Urgent)
Date: August 8, 2012 7:28:54 AM EDTHello,
I work for the digital marketing agency iProspect on behalf of British Gas.
As part of our ongoing SEO campaign – we looking to edit or remove some of the backlinks pointing to the http://www.britishgas.co.uk domain name.We have identified the following link to British Gas on your site (otherstream.com):
http://www.otherstream.com/sections/school/page/4/
http://www.otherstream.com/2009/02/05/boliers-and-books/We would like to work with you and request that one of the below actions are taken regarding this link.
This is to ensure that our client avoids violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines in any form due to a historic decision they or a previous agency has made.• Please remove the link(s) from your website
Please note that we are not trying to imply that your website is of fault for violating any guidelines, but that we have advised British Gas should remove any historic links that they acquired which could be interpreted as paid or intended to manipulate PageRank.
Please let me know if you are able to action this request or if you require any further information.
Apologies if you have received multiple emails, this is due to their being multiple links on your website (please review each one).Kind regards
I believe I’ll decline. And by the way, please take this opportunity to go fuck yourself.
Embarassing. I used to work for iProspect years ago. BTW, this could easily become news amongst the SEO community if the right person picks it up.
It’s actually already gotten a fair amount of blog attention. Just Google “british.gas@iprospect.com”.
Yikes. You know, full disclosure, I now head up a (competing) SEO program at a different agency, and we would never ever do anything like this. Believe it or not, SEO isn’t all snake oil, and it’s things like this that create that impression.
I’m sad for all my former coworkers, assuming that they aren’t also victims (it’s possible these emails are somehow spoofed–i.e., that BritishGas is an iProspect client but some third party is posing as iProspect to knock the links out. iP was always pretty ‘white hat’ when I was there until 5 years ago).