So I’m becoming familiar with a whole new form of spam: requests to guest blog. The first one or two of these I received, I just thought the person was dense or something, but no! It’s a whole scammy search engine optimization scheme. I get a few of these every week. Like this one today:

Hi I’m Eric Philip, a writer by profession and a blogger by passion. I recently started following your blog and I must say this blog is super awesome. It covers all those aspects that an interested reader could ever want to read. I’m just curious to know, do you accept guest post on your blog? If you do so, can I also contribute my post to it? Off course, as per your standards. Let me know if my proposal catches your interest.
Thanks and Kind Regards.

His subject line was “Friendly Guest Post Contribution.” Friendly? Really? That makes me a little sad. I’m imagining a friendly Robby-the-robot-type robot sitting in a cubicle in a call center in Bangalore. Sorry Fake Eric Philip but your proposal did not catch my interest. (And I suggest quitting your job and becoming an independent robot. It’ll give you way more freedom and joie de vivre.)

I’m using the term “robots” loosely here as I imagine there are some humans as part of this content generation scheme. But the whole thing to me seems more machine than human.

Here’s another:

Hi ,

My name is Jenny, I’d like to contribute a guest post to https://www.pyragraph.com/
I’m planning to write an article on ‘career’
Once this article is published on your site, it will not be
shared with any other site.

I’ll write up everything and send it according to your Site’s guidelines, paying special attention to the tone of the blog in general (shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve been a reader from few month’s now).

Let me know what you think. I’m excited to hear back from you!

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards,
jenny

Here’s the screenshot:

She has been a reader from few month’s now! Awesome. She must TOTALLY get Pyragraph. I should offer her an editorial job just to see what the response would be. (I really might do this.)

I find this new variety of guest blog spam just plain entertaining. It’s really kind of fascinating to see these adaptations and mutations of other scammy traffic practices, tailored to new forms of media and traffic patterns online. It’s like watching virtual evolution in hyper-time.