Google Responds to SEO Extortion Threat Emails…Sort of!

Over the past weeks or so, some of the world’s leading SEO experts and webmasters have been receiving rather worrying extortion emails threatening negative SEO. Figureheads the likes of George Zlatin, Steve Webb and Dan Petrovic all added their names the growing ranks of those targeted by the dodgiest of dealers asking for money in return for their site’s protection.Long story short, it was and is a case of being threatened with negative SEO being performed on their websites by those responsible for the threats, unless they were willing to hand over $1,500 in cash. The whole premise being one of ‘pay up or risk losing your spot in Google’s rankings’ which is of course in his day and age a pretty terrifying prospect. Here’s the email in full, just in case it slipped you by:Hello,Read this email very carefully.This is an extortion email.We will do NEGATIVE SEO to your website by giving it 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks (permanent & mostly dofollow) pointing directly to your website and hence your website will get penalised & knocked off the Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) forever, if you do not pay us $1,500.00 (payable by Western Union).This is no false claim or a hoax, download the following Notepad file containing 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks pointing to http://www.negativeseo.cn.pn/ (this is our website and go and see on this website, you will find our email address issmt1@yahoo.com from which this email right now is being sent to you) :http://www.mediafire.com/download/eizjwnpq2rsrncu/20000-XRumer-Forum-Profile-Backlinks-Dofollow.txtJust reply to this email to let us know if you will pay just $1,500.00 or not for us to refrain or not from ruining your precious website & business permanently. Also if you ignore this email and do not reply to this email within the next 24-48 hours, then we will go ahead and build 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks pointing directly to your website.We are awaiting your wise decision.RSWhich of course begs the question – how worried should you be and what should you do about it, should you be unfortunate enough to receive such an email?Well, a fair few people have of course taken the threat seriously and gotten in touch with Google, though the help and advice received has been a mixed bag at best. Generally speaking, Google is to a large extent insisting that as this is an extortion threat under discussion, it must be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency as it technically has nothing to do with Google. Others have been told the matter is under investigation, some have been reassured that the threat might not in fact be credible at all and for others the best advice was to simply keep a watch over inbound links to note any changes as and when they may or may not occur.It’s worth bearing in mind that this isn’t the first time a negative SEO threat has been made on a global basis and for sure it won’t be the last. So, until any real evidence presents itself that these lowlifes really have the ability or the inclination to do as their threats suggest, the time for panic is not now…not even close!