Website Promotion Scams

This page is for website owners / managers.

Are you inundated with phone calls or emails saying things like: "Let us promote your website...." or "Add your site to our highly popular directory...". There is a dramatically increasing number of so called website promotion companies. Many of them have teams dedicated to calling every website they can find (on the search engines). Others send you spam email. Here is my basic rule:

If a promotion company finds you they are probably bad.
If you find them they are probably good.

Think about it: Why would a website promotion company need to cold call/email? If they were so good they would promote their own website effectively and their market would find them!

• They often find your email address by harvesting it from your website, see harvested address spam.
• or via domain name spam.
• Links: Some of these companies offer to arrange links for your website. Hiring companies to arrange links can also be very dangerous! Most of them will get bad links which will result in a 'search engine rank penalty' ie your site losing its rank. The best way to get good links is for you to arrange them carefully and honestly from high quality websites e.g. some of your clients may write a recommendation (link) on their site about your services. Remember: If a promotion company finds you they are probably bad. If you find them they are probably good.
  

Website Marketing Spam:

• If you have a website you may receive emails from companies that claim to have reviewed your website and offer to market the site to thousands of search engines. The email looks like a real person has checked the site. What really happens is an automatic system visits millions of sites and harvests the email addresses from the sites. Then 'it' sends a message offering to promote your website e.g. to submit your site to 500,000 search engines.
• Any company that sends spam email has no credibility. These tools do not get good results and can get your site banned from the major search engines!
• These so called 'marketing opportunities' are sent to millions of people by a computer NOT A REAL PERSON. The message may look personal, it may have your email address, your website name, evan a picture of your website - this is all done with mass-scanning systems that trawl the internet.
  

Quote from Google.com
Google.com say such services are bad. Google.com is a major search engine. This is what they say about email marketing spam:
Be wary of marketing firms that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
"Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."
Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

-----Real example of an email marketing spam message--------

Hi
I visited WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM, and noticed that you're not listed on some search engines! I think we can offer you a service which can help you increase traffic and the number of visitors to your website.

I would like to introduce you to TrafficXYZ.com. We offer a unique technology that will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

You'll be surprised by the low cost, and by how effective this website promotion method can be.

To find out more about TrafficXYZ and the cost for submitting your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories, visit www.TrafficXYZ.con.

I would love to hear from you.

---------end of example---------

Our advice is: DO NOT USE THESE SERVICES! they can get your website penalized on the important search engines!

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