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Have you ever received an email from Vanessa Lintner of Seeker
Center? If you have a website and an email address you probably
have. If you haven't made their spam list yet you may have received
some spam from their relatives at TrafficMagnet.com.
October 2004 Update: 19 months later, the spam
continues. Here's the latest.
Lately, the emails have looked like this:
March 2003
Ten things you should know about Vanessa Linter and TrafficMagnet.
-
 There
is no Vanessa Linter. The site is hosted by a company
called PDHost which
doesn't exist at their stated location in Silicon Valley.
- Before Vanessa Linter was Vanessa Linter, she was
Sarah Williams and Christine
Hall, as you can see from this from this
Spam Abuse posting from June 2002.
- SeekerCenter says they will submit your site to 500,000 search
engines and directories, yet there are only a handful of true
search engines and few directories will accept automated submissions.
In fact, running a reverse lookup on their domain name doesn't
show even one directory listing for their own site
- and only two inbound links as of this writing.
- They claim they can submit your site for a one-time
fee of $59, yet submitting to three important search
engines (Inktomi, FAST, and AskJeeves) costs $103 per
year. Yahoo costs an additional $299/year.
So, they are obviously not submitting your site to places where
people actually run searches online.
- Google is the most important search engine to submit your
site to and you don't need to pay anyone to
do that (just click
here and fill out the two line form). Search engine optimization
professionals do not charge for this. Their services are for
achieving high rankings on relevant search terms for your business.
- SeekerCenter is clearly spamming website owners.
Here is a link to over
200 posts on Google Groups from other website owners who
share our opinion on this. Not surprisingly, the majority of
those posts reside in the following groups:
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings
news.admin.net-abuse.email
de.admin.net-abuse.mail
alt.alt.spamtrap
- They say they will resubmit your site very month, which is
not necessary. Once a search engine knows
your site exists you do not need to resubmit it to search engines.
This will not improve your rankings. You improve
your rankings by aligning your site's info with the terms your
potential customers are searching for and increasing your site's
link popularity.
- Never trust a company that doesn't place a physical
address or phone number on their web site.
- By submitting your site to thousands of 3rd, 4th, 5th tier
and beyond web sites, you'll probably end up with an inbox crammed
with spam from other companies like TrafficMagnet collecting
your email address. Remember, TrafficMagnet has already proven
they do not respect your privacy by sending unsolicited
email to you. It seems probable that you could lose much more
than $20/month in productivity cleaning your inbox.
- Creating a high ranking website involves time consuming work
seeking out relevant links for a website. This process cannot
be automated.
We hope this clarifies the value of that service.
For more information on Vanessa's spamming ways, check out An
open letter to Vanessa Lintner of SeekerCenter.net.
Ed Kohler is the president and founder of Haystack
In A Needle - a full service web marketing and search engine
positioning firm based in Minneapolis, MN. Ed has a rule set up
in his email program to filter SeekerCenter emails directly to
the trash.
Click here to submit a
free quote to get started on professional web marketing planning
today.
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