Domain Notification: This is your Notice of Domain Listing

Filed in Scams To Avoid on Nov.30, 2009 By Keith Lunt

Here’s a warning about an email that I received last night about one of my own domain names. No doubt many customers will receive the exact same email and some may even try to part with cash for it. But it is nothing more than a scam. The main contents read:

As a courtesy to domain name holders, we are sending you this notification for your business Domain name search engine registration. This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration and save.

Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web.

Privatization allows the consumer a choice when registering. Search engine subscription includes domain name search engine submission. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below unless you accept this offer. Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice it is a courtesy reminder to register your domain name search engine listing so your customers can locate you on the web.

This Notice for: godiving.org will expire on December 01,2009 Act today!

Obviously, it’s trying to induce panic. The notice expires tomorrow, it has to be acted upon quickly. But what is it offering? It seems to be annual search engine submission. Why though? The website is listed in search engines and gets hundreds of hits per day, through search engines.

In fact, the service they seem to be offering is a waste of time – “annual submission to search engines” – just where is the point? Is it saying to Google each year ‘I still exist’. Google knows that – it can see your entire site and knows just how many visitors it is sending to you. It can, if it wishes, monitor how many people it sends through it’s search engine listings and how quickly they make another search. Big Brother like? Unbelievable? Maybe not, but too much for today… Maybe tomorrow.

Back to the subject – Search engines know that your site exists and it is, or isn’t, getting traffic. Telling them each month or each year is a waste of time. If you want to so it, it will take 2 minutes, definitely not worth $75 for one year. Even the text at the bottom of the email makes it clear:

Search engine submission is an optional service that you can use as a part of your website optimization and alone may not increase the traffic to your site.

So they admit it ‘may not’ do any good. If you are already listed, I’d say it will not do any good. Using such basic measures, especially weekly, is just like waving a flag to Google saying ‘Please list me, I’m not getting listed, my site isn’t working.’ Would that really make a search engine want to list you?