Watch: Hello, this is an extortion email.
A blackmailer demanded $1,500 to not point 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks at our site. Here is the email in full, Google's response to the campaign, and a 2016 follow-up DDoS extortion attempt.
Transcript
Imagine receiving an email that gets straight to the point, opening with the words: this is an extortion email. That is exactly what happened recently in a blatant negative Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, campaign.
The sender demanded fifteen hundred dollars. If the victim did not pay, the extortionist threatened to point twenty thousand spammy forum backlinks to their website. The goal of this attack is to trigger a Google penalty and knock the victim's site off the search results forever.
This was not an isolated incident. The exact same threat was broadcast to numerous businesses and webmasters. In the past, Google shifted its stance on negative SEO, admitting that malicious links could actually harm a site, which led them to create a link disavow tool so webmasters could protect themselves.
When notified about this latest campaign, Google stated that its algorithms are designed to prevent these activities from causing problems, and they questioned how credible the threat really is. However, for many website owners, the danger feels very real. It is part of a broader trend of digital extortion, which sometimes includes Distributed Denial of Service attacks demanding hundreds of dollars to keep websites online. For now, webmasters are keeping a close watch, updating their disavow files, and hoping Google's defenses hold up.