A. A good question that's easy to answer, sort of.

"There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase often credited to P.T. Barnum (1810 – 1891), an American showman. It is generally taken to mean that there are (and always will be) a lot of gullible people in the world.

Spammers often rely on this gullibility to lure people into buying something or disclosing information the spammer will try to exploit to their advantage. However, sales and exploitation are not the only reason for spam messages. Recently there has been an increase in spam attempting to sell services that are freely available.

An e-mail message that guarantees to increase your website's "rankings" on search engines is an attempt to gain access to your website so they can deface it, or use it for their own promotion or purposes.

Never under any circumstances should you give out your website access information, to anyone, unless you're certain you know the person or you're certain they are legitimately going to assist you.

Search Engine Optimization should be free. Paying someone other than your website designer to perform SEO on your site is wasting your money, and will potentially allow someone access to your website and files which could be damaging.

Don't get sucked into a "deal" with illegitimate web people, just because they figured out how to send out a million spam e-mail messages.