As you may have heard, last week, many SEOs, including Dan Petrovic, Steve Webb and George Zlatin received extortion emails from an alleged SEO claiming they will perform negative SEO on their site if they do not pay up $1,500.

The email starts off reading, “This is an extortion email.” Then it goes on to explain they will perform tactics called negative SEO to negatively impact the site’s performance in Google, possibly leading to the site being deindexed by Google.

Here is a copy of the email, if you have not seen it yet:

I sent these notices to Google last week and they responded saying:

(1) They have investigated the claims

(2) They are “unclear how credible this threat really is”

(3) That “you can also choose to use the disavow tool” – so make sure to keep an eye on your new links report.

(4) That you should “report extortion to law enforcement” – although I am not sure how much that would do.

(5) Also report it if it is via Gmail to https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

That being said, I wonder how many are worried about these random negative SEO extortion threats? We’ve seen them before, we reported them back in January. Many feel negative SEO works and that it is way easier now.

Do Negative SEO Extortion Emails Scare You?

Forum discussion at Twitter.