We encourage you to watch our video, but for those of you who don’t care for the visual arts . . .
Here at 101domain, not a day goes by that we don’t receive terrible SEO outreach emails. By virtue of running a website with a decent amount of traffic, we receive a ton of these bad boys. If you have ever run a website, then you know what I’m talking about. You receive these emails riddled with grammar mistakes, promising to rank you #1 in Google overnight. I don’t know about you, but I find the irony to be quite delightful.
It sparked a magnetic idea here in the office—what if we were to scrounge up a compilation of all the great SEO outreach fails and reach out to the community at large to submit their best fails as well? Not only would it be an office treasure, but we think it would really be enjoyed by those who encounter this kind of material all the time.
We are reaching out to you, the SEO community, to gather your funniest outreach email fails.
Please send your submissions to True at [email protected].
To prime the pump, here are some of our favorite examples submitted thus far:
1. Article Requirements by Genuine Guys
“Your article should be free from grammar mistake.” Free from grammar mistake. TechGeekers was serving us up a healthy dose of irony on this one, but one missing “s” wasn’t enough for us to consider sharing this with you. It’s the subsequent bullet point that made us chuckle.
“Article title shouldn’t loner than to 76 characters.” With a triple typo following a request to only submit articles that are “free from grammar mistake,” this juxtaposition is just masterful.
Later on the same page, we discovered more gold. There was a section detailing how long they are willing to leave your guest post up on their site. Here is the screenshot:
There are several things that killed us: “(1 year),” “there some guest post site owner,” and particularly “we are genuine guys.” Depending on how you read it, it’s either saying that we, as guys, are genuine; OR, if you add a comma, it’s a bit of a plea to the reader—we are genuine, guys! Either way, it seems that their standards are very high.
2. The Golden Rule: 48pt. Font
This one is a personal favorite of mine. Here we have a screenshot of an email from a website responding to someone trying to place a guest post. It seems like they got caught with a little something-something!
Obviously, the unspoken rules of SEO guest-post outreach were spoken fairly loudly in this email. I always thought the golden rule was “treat others the way you want to be treated,” but apparently in the world of SEO “we kindly ask to not bother us asking for the impossible, such as ‘I am looking for free posts with commercial links.’”
Also, I feel like if you’re going to ask someone to “kindly” do something, you shouldn’t bold, underline, or have it in 48pt. font for it to actually be meaningful. If someone writes me a scathing email, then follows it up with “thanks,” I usually take it sarcastically.
As much as you try including a natural backlink to your client without paying for it, “that’s not going to happen (period). Ever (period).”
3. Let American State Grasp
Our final example is your standard SEO outreach email—our video up top really does it justice (thank you Steve Wiideman for supplying this). Here, we see our friend start off strong, but get a little lost along the way.
In all my years doing SEO work, I have always wondered if my article with do-follow link let American state grasp does one have to be compelled to be paid post sites? Our dear linkbuilder is asking all the right questions. But he was not done!
We’ll be sure to send our link builder here a positive response, because he’s not waiting for our negative response.
For tips on how to do email marketing the right way, read this article from GetVoIP. Or, you may look for a site that has a “submit articles” page, such as Medium, ArticleCube, or SeekingAlpha. A lot of these sites will add a “nofollow” tag to the outbound link, so be sure to check existing articles beforehand.
If you have screenshots of your own that you’d like added to this article, please send them to [email protected].