At least once every three months I get a solicitation in the mail asking me to send money to a company who will list me with search engines.

What year are these people living in? Do they expect me to believe that just because a new year has begun search engines will delete my sites from their index?

In their defense they do make it clear that they are soliciting an offer and this is not a bill, it just looks a lot like a bill.

So, what do they offer for a yearly fee of $35?

Domain name submission to 14 established search engines, quarterly search engine position and ranking reports for eight keyword/phrase listings from 14 major search engines.

Yep, not much. Domain name submission, I have never done that yet I get tons of traffic from the search engines out there every day. Quarterly reports? At least they are not trying to sell SEO services and top spot rankings for keywords.

    Here is the list of the 14 search engines:

  • AllTheWeb
  • AOL
  • Google
  • LookSmart Inktomi
  • MSN
  • Northern Light
  • Search.com
  • AltaVista
  • Excite
  • HotBot
  • Lycos
  • Netscape Netcenter
  • Open Directory
  • Web Crawler

Wow! I see big bad Google on the list but no Yahoo? Some of these search engines I have never even heard of! Does Netscape Netcenter still exist? Isn't Web Crawler just a search engine that searches other search engines?

If you get one of these letters in the mail just do yourself a favor and tear it up and throw it away. I think I just wasted more time writing about it than it deserved.

Most search engines have a free way to add your site to their index. Try that route before you pay anyone for SEO services.