The story as it stands so far...

One of the things I've done in the past couple of years is to scrape the search engines for content.  Once I get that content, I sometimes tweak it, but invariably it ends up on my network of sites to feed the search engines more of what they're looking for.  (Ok, maybe that's a stretch but they DO crawl and index my sites :))

Occasionally, this type of rogue behavior upsets people.  It usually amounts to a cease and desist e-mail.  Some of them are boring, some of them are amusing and some I find hysterical.  Most have very poor grammar.  Actually, I don't think I've seen one that sounded like it was written by a real lawyer.

I digress...

A couple of days ago I received a letter from a Kimberly Williams of Boston School Of Electrolysis (as Rand noted in his cleanup post).  Without posting the e-mail for all to see, what I found most amusing about it was that she accused me of identity theft.  As the FTC says:

Identity theft is a serious crime. How does it happen?
Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.

Kimberly has also blessed me with the stunning new moniker - Spamming Scum-Bag Thief.

Once again, I found it rather amusing.  Now, Kimberly used whois to track me down.  When she first looked at the domain in question, it had privacy protection so she looked at the name server that it was pointed to and assumed that the website and the nameserver were owned by the same person.

In this particular case, that assumption is wrong and the website is owned by a customer of mine.  Nevertheless, as a favor to my host, I decided to remove the content from that particular page.

However, I figured a few people would enjoy the e-mail and I posted it shortly thereafter on SEOmoz.

It appears that Kimberly also did some searching and came across my very outdated blog as well and even found my bio (which she later accused me of falsifying).

The post stirred up a bit of controversy and the feelings went across the spectrum, from worst post evah to great post, funny shit.

Fast forward a couple of days, a few more phone calls from Kimberly asking if I was on the sex offenders registry, etc. and finally she posted on SEOmoz...more than a dozen times (and contacted Rand & other member of SEOmoz's staff).

Now, I have no hard feelings toward Randfish at all taking the advise of his legal team.  Personally I disagree with him in that I don't think it's illegal to post an e-mail someone has sent you, but that's my opinion and I'm not a lawyer :)

Having said that, there are a few things that one can glean from all of this.

1. First and foremost of course, is how your business looks to those around you.  Will the public image that you have generate more or less customers?  In my particular case, the controversy only helps me as I'm a black hat and that's the kind of things people would expect from a black hat.  For Ms. Williams, however, it might tarnish her reputation.  For instance, look at this.  While I cannot establish the veracity of this website, I can say that the behavior posted there is very similar to what I've seen when listing to the voicemails that Ms. Williams left as well as reading her e-mails.
2. Whois privacy is a double edged sword.  While you may think that you're hiding your info, quite often the person who is trying to track you down will go to your host.  If you don't have a good relationship with your host, you could easily have your websites shut down.
3. Do you have a legal team to back you?  Yes, some people are upset that Rand deleted the original post (which is already indexed in Google), but he's got to look out for his business and make sure that it isn't hurt by his blog.  There have been a few times where I've had to depend on a lawyer but, usually, ignoring these people works rather well :)
4. What type of publicity do you want?  Both SEOmoz and the Boston School of Electrolysis have seen a surge of people recently over the posts but how will it affect either in the long run?  I believe that the larger the company the more they'll work to protect their public image.  The smaller ones usually go with the "all publicity is good publicity" motto.
5. Pagejackers are a waste of your time people.  If you want better rankings, simply optimize your site and outrank the suckers.  It's not that hard.  My sites don't have that many links pointing to them and in most cases I'm targeting the very long tail so it should be incredibly easy to push them off the map.
6. And finally, of course, is the question of whether you have better things to do with your time.  Personally, I write for SEOmoz because I enjoy it.  I get to be in the public eye just a little bit and have some stimulating conversations with a few people - some of whom have become good friends.  So I don't consider it a waste of my time.  I'd suspect, however, that Ms. Williams could find better things to do with her time than trying so hard to protect a name that isn't even trademarked :)

As a sidenote, when you call someone up on the phone and leave a message, telling them you're filing charges for them being a stalker in another state isn't lkikely to get you a return call.

And that, as they say, is that - and it's also related to SEO now.  That should make the naysayers happy :)

G-Man