Don’t be victim of annual search engine registration scam

(Updated: October 20, 2011)

Watch out for fake domain renewal invoices!

Lately I’ve been getting “renewal” notices for search engine submissions. They look like domain renewal invoices to the unsavvy person in your office who doesn’t read the part that says “This is not an invoice.” And they look so darned official. Who wouldn’t want their website to continue to be submitted to search engines for $75 a year?

Don’t waste your money on bogus search engine submission services!

For one thing, this is not something that needs to be done annually, or at all in most cases.

For another, your site might already be listed. Find out by pasting the following in your browser address bar. (Replace “example.com” with your own site, of course.)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/

While Google and the other engines do have submission forms on their sites, that’s not how they decide whether to index a site.

Years ago Google gave up trying to get people to realize that Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it’s likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear. –Google

So they added Google Webmaster Central to make SEO more manageable for users and less of a drain on Google resources.

In the beginning of a website’s existence, it’s been noticed that Google seems to give brand-new sites the benefit of the doubt for a very short period, and you might see your site come up for your company name or whatever is in the title tag. But it doesn’t last long if your site doesn’t offer unique information.

Before you launch an all-out attack to get listed in Google et al, make sure your site is *currently* worthy of free search engine traffic. If you’ve just slapped up a single web page while you work on content, or all your pages are “under construction,” let me put it bluntly: It’s not worth the search engines’ attention. If you absolutely must have incoming traffic to pay the bills, consider PPC (pay-per-click advertising on Google). (Full disclosure: one of my other “hats” is PPCsmith.com, a PPC manager.)

And please know that Google Webmaster Central is not the be-all and end-all for SEO. Incoming links — aquired because of excellent, unique content on your website — are the very best way for the engines to find your site. There’s no such thing as annual search engine registration. Don’t waste All you have to do is get one site to link to you.