Yesterday I got an “invoice” in the mail for a domain I own that doesn’t even have a website on it. In actuality, this is not an invoice for services rendered but an offer for “domain name submission” to search engines, but the formatting of the letter would make the average person look twice. If you’re a small business owner, you might remember getting “Yellow Page” solicitations in the past that looked like bills for services rendered, and an unscrupulous website submission company appears to be following the same pattern.
What is laughable about this letter is that the submission to “20 established search engines” is such an outdated tactic that is not worth your time. Search engines can already find your site, and they’re probably using the same WHOIS information that the scammer used to send you the letter. It is in a search engine’s best interest to “ping” new domain names every once in a while to see if content shows up. In one of my own personal tests, I have gotten a site cached within 3 days of buying a domain name, with no attempts at submission or linking of any kind.
If you go to the website listed on the phony invoice, the list of “20” search engines is not even up to date. In reality, if you want to submit your content to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, there are easy ways to do it. You can submit to Google Here, Yahoo Here, and Bing Here. If you want to submit your other URLs to marginal third-tier search engines, you can look them up online and save yourself the submission fee. As always, you should check the terms and conditions for submission to some of the smaller engines, since they might make their money reselling your contact information to SEO companies looking for lists of new submissions.
Finally, if you respond to a deceptive SEO invoice in the mail, you are almost certain to get continuous pitches for other services which may have limited value. A true SEO campaign costs more because it involves time, education, and money. However, you can still learn enough about SEO for free to get far better results than you would from giving somebody $60+ to throw your site into a piece of software that cost him $500, assuming he didn’t find a free version somewhere that does the same thing.
