Is this a new scam? outsourcedcontenttoday.com HomeOutreacher.com etc

[Clinton]

I've been getting emails from people claiming to be interested in buying ad space links on one of my sites. It's a bit of a rubbish site and I've not done anything on it for several years. Seems strange that suddenly several people want to buy ads on it. I thought maybe the site has suddenly jumped in SERPs or something, but that's not the case.

Then I find that all these people are writing from email addresses at relatively new domains such as outsourcedcontenttoday.com and HomeOutreacher.com (the owners of whom all seem to be hiding behind WHOIS privacy)

Is this a scam to confirm a working email address for the webmaster before sending spam? Or is there something else at play?

[crabfoot]

I've mentioned before that there are "resurrectionists" who build sites on dropped domains for unexplained various reasons. They usually ask me for triangular link exchanges on .uk domains that get one visitor a month.

The way I have interpreted that state of affairs is that the link builders have some quota in which they need to get a proportion of .uk links - I'm basing that on one occasion where I offered a link from a .com that they didn't want, but they did want one from a .org .uk with a similar name. They always offer higher PR links than the site they want a link from.

If the site is PR3 or more, I would guess that these people are simply looking to buy links. I would also guess that you wouldn't be comfortable about selling those links/ads to someone whose services you wouldn't endorse because you haven't used them.

So I will further guess that you will ignore the messages until you know more about them - and when, in the future, you might feel happier about advertising their services you will probably find they don't want to advertise on your site, they've found someone hungrier with less scruples to advertise with.

WTH we're all curious.