The SEO scammers are at it again. This time, they’re tricking unsuspecting website owners into thinking their website is infringing upon the scammer’s trademark, specifically – images.
Check out this email from Alice Eyman at The Watch Judge.
To the untrained eye, you might be thinking this request looks legit. In many cases, website owners have third parties putting content on their website and might not realize this is a scam designed to get a backlink (SEO credit) from the victim’s website to the scammers.
Based on a quick backlink report via Ahrefs, it has become apparent how widespread this SEO link-building scam is.
How do we know it’s a scam?
The first indication that this was a scam was the image creator’s name on Adobe Stock Images was different from Alice’s. Second, The Watch Judge has nothing to do with photography. The Watch Judge is a website that reviews watch products. After the end-user reads the watch review, the product listing from Amazon is presented, resulting in a commission to The Watch Judge should a purchase happen.
Links are a critical component of SEO. In this particular case, the links and content have skyrocketed The Watch Judge to 6,500 unique visitors per month from Google alone.
We reached out to Amazon and Google for comment. At this time, we have not heard back but will update this post as we learn more.
