Trish Williams at SearchEngineRanking.ass wants to help me grow my personal injury practice in Seattle, according to an email she just sent me.

Hi! My name is Trish Williams and I am an internet marketing specialist. I googled the word "Seattle personal injury lawyers" and your website is currently ranked 64 for that term.

If you want to get your website to the TOP 10 – We can help! With both Local Business Listing and Organic Search Ranking.

Wait a minute, Ken, you might say. We, your faithful readers, know that you don't practice personal injury law (much), and that you don't practice in Seattle, and that Popehat is not a site you use to promote your practice anyway. What gives?

Well, Trish is apparently confused. She must have looked at several posts ridiculing sleazy Seattle lawyers for promoting themselves through comment spam, became disoriented, and concluded that we are ourselves Seattle lawyers promoting ourselves on this site. Perhaps Trish has special needs. Perhaps Trish has recently sustained a major head injury.

Or perhaps, more likely, Trish and her company use some sort of program to spam blogs with emails automatically when pre-selected search terms appear upon them, without any human being checking first to see if the search term actually has anything to do with the blog. Perhaps Trish is a friend or associate of SEO spammer Jamie Spottz, who previously offered us some entertainment, and uses a similar brand name. Perhaps Trish has relied upon impersonal software and has not, personally, contemplated the irony of sending marketing spam to a web site based on its posts ridiculing and criticizing spam marketing.

Perhaps potential customers of Trish and SearchEngineRanking.ass should ask themselves — why would I pay good money to "marketing experts" who themselves market through irritating spam? Why would I trust my reputation to people who would promote themselves that way? Why would I trust my reputation to people who would not only market themselves through offensive and impertinent spam, but would use their own names and put their own pictures on the internet while they do it?

When you outsource your marketing — including search engine placement — you outsource your ethics and your reputation.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

• Journalistic/Blogger Ethics Question - June 19th, 2013
• The Road To Popehat: Back From Hiatus Edition - June 19th, 2013
• Lady Justice's Occasional Friends - June 19th, 2013
• Easing Back In, With Ponies - June 18th, 2013
• Prenda Law: The Sound of One Shoe Dropping - May 20th, 2013