Dean Hunt (deanhunt.com), some no-name just getting started in the world of SEO, recently posted a letter that he claims to have received from an on-line business owner. In the letter, the business owner says that Dean's site is ranking better on some term (we're not told) that is important to his business, and asks Dean to remove himself from the rankings on that term.

Dean wrote the man back and told him to stuff it, basically. The man wrote back again and this time threatened legal action if he does not remove himself from the google rankings.

I call BS.

First of all, anyone remotely smart enough to be checking their ranking on "terms" knows that this isn't how the game is played. The supposed business owner claims that retail sites are more important than blogs and so he should be ranked higher on this term. Either this is fake, or the business owner is the dumbest person on the face of the planet.

Every person who has spent more than 2 minutes on the web knows this isn't how it works. Google ranks on relevancy, period. It doesn't matter if you're retail, a blog, or any other kind of site. If google deems you relevant, you get better rankings. I would expect anyone doing Internet retail to know this already.

Now, there is also the issue of the smoking gun. Here is a post on Dean's blog about how he is about to mount a big viral campaign. Hmm... could this suspicious letter be part of that viral campaign? If so, it has been a huge success - getting him over 40,000 hits and tons of inbound links.

If this isn't his viral campaign, I'd like to see what is! The first rule of a viral marketing campaign is that you don't talk about your viral marketing campaign.

The story was submitted to slashdot by, you guessed it, an anonymous user. Oh gee, could it have been Dean himself? I wonder.

Dean didn't grace us with the details on who this business owner is, or what the term is that is supposedly in dispute. Could he have done this so that he wouldn't miss any of the inbound links? He wants people linking to him, and not the business owner (which doesn't actually exist).

Also, Dean claims to have nothing on his site about the term in question. This makes it doubtful that this scenario could even be true, and if it were - surely Dean would not be a difficult person to outrank with a little effort.

There are other things that tip this off as a definite fake - like for example the business owner says he is sending something by post, but doesn't have Dean's physical address (and the domain was registered by proxy so it's not in the whois). I wouldn't be surprised if the whole site was a fake.

Hey Dean - nice one.