It is time for me to rant about this again. Anyone who owns an Internet domain sees both of these scams and, it appears, many fall victim to at least one.
Scam 1
Either one month or at just about the one year mark of registering your Internet domain you will star to receive emails from scammers trying to sound official saying you need to pay money to them so they can register your domain correctly for you. Failure to do such will result in loss of your domain. Some of the more expensive scams will directly mail you with fancy looking envelops using names along the lines of “Internet Domain Registry Service” or some other thing which sounds legit at a quick read. Usually these scams are in the $1400 range. Email scams tend to be in the $300 range.
Here is the fact many of you don’t realize. If you set your Web site up through any of the major hosting services that annual fee you pay them takes care of the registry. Other than paying your host there is nothing you need to do once the domain is established.
Scam 2
Once the world and prosecutors started going after the purveyors of Scam 1 they changed their playbook and moved into the search engine registration world.
Back in the days when America On Line was mailing out more floppy disks each year to American citizens than the total population of America search engine registration was not only a valid thing, it was a necessity. People surfed the Web via dial-up and most search engines had rudimentary crawlers. Without being linked to a Web Portal site, you really couldn’t be found. By some counts there were thousands of Web Portals and search engines. Digital Equipment Corporation created the best search engine of the day Alta Vista which was later purchased by Yahoo.
Today there are still dozens if not hundreds of search engines. Most of you only know of 3
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
but I don’t think even Wikipedia keeps their list current.
You see, there are only a handful of general search engines, but there are still hundreds of niche or information specific search engines. If your site is peddling real information rather than celebrity gossip you do need to be “found” by the engines serving your niche. To some extend you need a one time broadcast to every known search engine.
Tip 1: Every legitimate hosting service (i.e. the place hosting your domain for less than $20/year) has a service to broadcast your site or sitemap to most if not all of these search engines. Usually these services try to lock you into a year, but more than 3 months is actually detrimental to your site ranking. Usually this service from your hosting provider costs around $20. There is no need to pay one of these email scams $300 or more.
Tip 2: Don’t use any search engine broadcast/registration service until you have the bulk of your initial/critical content up. The algorithm is used by each search engine will be different, but the logic will be the same. There first crawl through your site will determine how often they come back to look for new content. You need to have a high content ranking on the first pass to make them come back more quickly. You need to have a high content change to get your site moved up in crawler visit frequency. Some sites with massive active users posting comments and content get indexed every few minutes, the rest of us slug it out to get indexed once per month.
Tip 3: If you don’t serve an actual niche, just movie and celebrity gossip type of site, you don’t need a service at all. Both Bing and Google have Web pages you can visit to register your site with them. DuckDuckGo crawls Bing and other sites so once you are listed with Bing you will be listed on DuckDuckGo.
