No, this is not spam. Though it looks a bit like it.

Hardly a day goes by that I do not get an email from a random person/machine offering to “fix” my website.

Having worked in newspapers for most of four decades, even now my first reaction is to think of “errors” in a journalism sense.

“Wait, what? Did someone notice a couple of hedbusts on this blog? Too many typos in text? ‘Who’ and ‘whom’ embarrassingly swapped?”

What it is, of course, is people attempting to make money off some sap (that would be me) who has an under-the-radar site — like, say, this one.

From the perspective of the “helpers” … maybe, just maybe, I am silly enough to send them money to tinker with something on the blog that will drive thousands of people to the site.

Turns out, I’m not that silly, and the shifty people out there in the spam-i-verse are barking up the wrong tree.

The core “problem” for the people or machines that send me all those helpful (yet vaguely snotty and sloppily typed) emails … is that I have never thought about making money while blogging.

You may have noticed that in the history of this blog, advertising has appeared on the site for about one year. Most of a decade ago. One google-generated ad that appeared (briefly) after the most recent entry.

The rest of the time? Just words. My opinions. My observations. Sometimes with insightful commentary from readers. The occasional photo. Some links. A video every year or so.

People who make a living off peddling services to websites apparently can’t get their minds around this: I’m not in this for commercial gain.

It was about two years ago that I first started getting these fixing messages. They tend to fall into three categories.

–Vows to raise my Google “ranking” by improving my Search Engine Optimization (SEO). See the headline at the top of this item; several of those words are known for goosing hits. People who live out lives reading “click bait” love lists and secrets and are keen to lose weight.

–Offers to produce “better sales” on my site by allowing mystery experts to address all the problems here. Such as SEO (that again), but also “stumpy image optimization” (not enough photos), “deprived website content” (not enough entries), “inappropriate social media campaign” (failing to use other sites to drive traffic to this one).

–Offers to exchange promotion with another website. For “exposure” that will certainly lead to more hits for me. Those often come with little notes from “people” expressing a deep respect for my site, and if I will carry an item they have posted — on a topics I have written about — they will (somehow) carry an item from this blog.

It’s all a bit sad and tawdry.

But those are not as depressing as those from somebody’s bots noting how little content I have (4,000 posts is not enough, apparently), inviting me to pay this other site to create content for my site. The most recent example of this spam noted how creating content is “boring and takes too much time” and how this other site can create content that fools spam-filters and puffs up your site.

If we are at a place where native English speakers cannot tell the difference between a computer-generated item and one actually written by a human … well, that’s alarming.

I imagine all of you have dealt with this over the years.

I get enough of these offers that a time or two I have mulled writing back to the fake name on the email and asking, “Why are you bothering me about this now? Did I cross some threshold of blog posts? Is there some other barracuda site out there that sells kits on how to make money from peddling services to improve even lamer websites? Are you being held captive?”

The whole of it is tacky and sad and seems to be based on a predator/prey construct. But that is what the web is all about.

Except here! Not selling anything! Come or don’t! Stay or leave! Call me a sucker, but everything on this site is free.