The infographic plot thickens!

Interesting developments in the saga of the infographics.

While out of town on business I received this very polite note:

Subject: Request for link removal – ForensicPsychology.net

Good evening Webmaster,

We were notified that our site, ForensicPsychology.net has come under review by Google for some link building practices from the past. We are contacting you in that context.

We are making major changes to the site and undertaking efforts to build great content that we hope people will naturally link to. However, in the interim period, we are contacting people who have linked to us in the past where there’s even a remote possibility that Google could view the link as “over optimized”.

We have also removed a lot of our infographics and some of our other content. So you might be linking to a 404’ed page.

As such, we would like to respectfully request that you remove all links to our site including the link on ceoln.wordpress.com/2012/06/19

We appreciate your past efforts to link to us, and as the new owners of this site, we are excited to unveil our upgraded site and content very soon, and would like to be able to keep in touch with you as that happens.
If you would be so kind as to respond and let us know if you can take the above requested actions, we would appreciate it. Apologies if you have received this email multiple times as we are being very aggressive in this, and thanks again for your patience.

Thank you
Cristina Roberston

I thought that was somewhat intriguing, but I was busy and didn’t do anything about it right away, and not long after there appeared this reminder:

Subject: Link Removal Request Reminder – ForensicPsychology.net

Dear Webmaster,

I’m not sure if you have responded, I tried searching for your response in my spam box, but couldn’t find it. Sorry if you have already. We were notified that our site, ForensicPsychology.net has come under review by Google for some link building practices from the past. We are contacting you in that context.

We are making major changes to the site and undertaking efforts to build great content that we hope people will naturally link to. However, in the interim period, we are contacting people who have linked to us in the past where there’s even a remote possibility that Google could view the link or the anchor text as “overly optimized”.

As such, we would like to respectfully request that you remove all links to our site including the link on ceoln.wordpress.com/2012/06/19

We appreciate your past efforts to link to us, and as the new owners of this site, we are excited to unveil our upgraded site and content very soon, and would like to be able to keep in touch with you as that happens.
If you would be so kind as to respond and let us know if you can take the above requested actions, we would appreciate it. Apologies if you have received this email multiple times as we are being very aggressive in this, and thanks again for your patience.

I’ve just now gone and removed the link to Forensic Psychology dot net from that page (along with an update pointing to this page), ’cause I am a Nice Guy. I notice that it is no longer the case that Criminal Justice Degree dot net says that it is copyright by Forensic Psychology dot net. On the other hand, the two sites still look veeeery similar and generic and Infographic in style, and one still wonders just what the heck might be going on.

And amusingly I also just received this, on my Second Life self’s email account:

Subject: Infographic about Nintendo’s Wild Success

Hey Dale,

I recently developed another infographic that could be a good fit for your site. I just wanted to reach out and share. It highlights and illustrates how Nintendo became the king of video games and the numbers behind their success.

You can check it out here:

Title: Nintendo MBA
Graphic: http://www.mbaonline.com/nintendo/

Let me know what you think, I would love for you to publish it if you find it suitable for your site.

Thank you,

Chloe
chloecarter180@gmail.com | MBAOnline.com

Maybe I should suggest that Chloe have a word with Cristina about the dangers of… whatever it is that they are doing.

Ooh, an Infographic!

From: Sarah Wenger ______@gmail.com via smtp.com

Hey Dale,

I recently developed a new infographic that I thought would be a good fit for your site. I thought I’d reach out and share a graphic with you that highlights/focuses/illustrates video game addiction in young boys and how it can affect their health in the future.

If you’d like to take a look, please let me know. Thanks!

That looks vaguely familiar! This time gmail stuck in that “via smtp dot com” to directly reflect the forgery, which is interesting.

I like “highlights / focuses / illustrates”. Although the naked parallel fails a bit on “focuses”, since it really wants an “on” here, and the other two don’t.

Did I mention that I wrote back to Katherine (the one offering an infographic on Elon Musk)?

I don’t think I’m actually interested in a graphic about Elon Musk,
but I am rather interested in the broader question of who created it
and what its goal is.

I’ve now had mail from you, and “Jen R”, and Tony Shin, in extremely
similar styles, offering me infographics about (respectively) Elon
Musk, NORML, and World of Warcraft.

Are you a team of aspiring designers trying to get your work seen by a
wider audience? Or something subtler?

Wildly curious,
David M. Chess

She seems to have been somewhat baffled by this, but did eventually reply:

Hi David,

My name’s Katherine and as stated in my previous email, I am part of a
team of designers/researchers that made a graphic highlighting the
life of Elon Musk. Mainly what we are trying to do is get you to link
the graphic to the resource page of your website. It promotes both
websites equally and helps us grow as artists and young professionals.
It’s 100% free of charge. Let me know what you think.

I like the nice upfrontness of “[m]ainly what we are trying to do is get you to link the graphic to the resource page of your website”, although of course she means link to the thing from the page (kids these days!). And I don’t think my website actually has a resource page.

Maybe I will reply to her again, copying Sarah. And maybe Tony. And…

:)