Jon's In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

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The Latest Search Engine ‘Service’ Scam

November 30th, 2006 · No Comments

I don’t know why, but I was surprised to receive an ad delivered to my mailbox. As part of some of the SE news digests I’ve subscribed to online, I also get occasional emails that are just an ad.

It’s just part of the package. The info they provide in the digests is very good, so an occasional ad is okay with me. But this one was different.

It was for yet another submission service – one of those companies who will, for a fee, submit you to the search engines. This one went one better.

It stated “You Will Be Listed In 48 Hours Guaranteed”. It even read below that guarantee that “Your Website Will Show Up In The Web’s Most Important Engines In 48 Hours” with the logos of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc mounted below.

Now, if you’ve read this blog, you know that Google does not seem to be indexing new domains, or at least a good percentage of them. So this guarantee of Google visibility sounded good. But then I read some more.

Further down I saw this – “In 48 hours or less…your site will begin to show up in the sponsored links [my emphasis] Google, Yahoo!, AOL, AltaVista, Excite, InfoSpace and many other search engines. No other service is able to match this claim.”

You’re reading that right – they’re not getting you into the ‘organic/regular’ index. They’re charging you $100 to open a Google Ads account for you. How nice of them.

Yes, your paid listing will be showing up in the search engines, but why should you pay them to do something you can do easily? Especially when they’re obviously presenting this service in very deceptive terms.

But, you might think, they can get me up and appearing in those listings in only 48 hours! Here’s something you should know – Google will start showing your paid search listings in as little as 15 MINUTES.

48 hours basically gives these guys time to sit around and get to it later. Unbelievably, the ad got even better.

“Using our superior proprietary submission software, your site will be submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing…” I’m not sure what software they could have developed to open a Google Ads account, but that is not something I would want handled robotically.

Would you trust software to write an advertisement for you or do your marketing? Of course not, but that’s what’s happening here. Your ad and marketing decisions require human hands and minds.

The capper was their claim to be “The most effective and unique search engine submission service available”. From what I know, there isn’t anything that could be particularly effective or unique about a submission service.

If they were offering to submit you to the organic/regular listings – which they are not – the process is a matter of filling in your URL in a box and pushing the Submit button.

If you can find a ‘unique and effective’ angle on doing that, I’d love to hear about it. Maybe they do it blindfolded.

If they mean the paid search submission, there’s not much room there to color outside the lines, so to speak.

It’s like an accountant saying that they have the most ‘unique and effective’ tax submission service. Frankly, I would prefer that my accountant submit my taxes straight to the government with no panache involved.

Why would I want, or need, my taxes to get there through some new, proprietary way? I can send them instantly online to the government. For free.

Watch your back, folks. These guys are sneaky.

UPDATE: Sorry, my mistake. It’s $100 A MONTH. They keep submitting you every 30 days to different search engines. Even better.

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