FAQ: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Who is Elisabeth Brown of Workmiracle.com?

Have you ever received an email from Elisabeth Brown of Workmiracle? If you have a website and an email address you probably have or will soon. We recently started receiving emails from this company and noticed some amazing similarities to one of the most notorious spamming sites on the web, TrafficMagnet.

Hopefully this puts this company's services and practices in proper perspective for our clients and anyone else who stumbles across this page.

Lately, the emails have looked like this:

Notice how similar the above email is to this classic spam email from TrafficMagnet:

What kind of salesperson doesn't include a phone number in their messages?

Ten things you should know about Elisabeth Brown and WorkMiracle.

1. There is no Elisabeth Brown. According to the WHOIS lookup at Network Solutions, WorkMiracle is actually based in Beijing, China.
2. Before Elisabeth Brown was Elisabeth Brown, she was Vanessa Lintner. Before Vanessa Lintner was Vanessa Lintner, she was Sarah Williams. And before Sarah Williams was Sarah Williams, she was Christine Hall, as you can see from this from this Spam Abuse posting from June 2002.
3. Apparently, Elisabeth Brown also works for a company called gaintrafficblaster.com, which also has a habit of spamming people.
4. WorkMiracle says they will submit your site to 300,000 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 - only links from message boards they've posted their spam on.
5. They claim they can submit your site for a one-time fee of $89, 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.
6. 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.
7. WorkMiracle is clearly spamming website owners. Here is a link to the Google Groups mentions of WorkMiracle from other website owners who have shared their opinions of this company. As of this writing, there were only two references to WorkMiracle on Google Groups, but that will surely increase as they ramp up the use of their latest company name and fake employee.
8. 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.
9. Never trust a company that doesn't place a physical address or phone number on their web site.
10. 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 loose more than $20/month in productivity cleaning your inbox. By the way, we don't recommend using the unsubscribe link within the email. The company has already proven they don't respect your privacy, so by filling out their unsubscribe form you're simply telling them you have an active email address which could lead to even more spam.

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.

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 WorkMiracle 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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