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ListingCorp - SEO scammers

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Journal at 11:04 am on January 16, 2007.

Ooh, controversial title or what?

A few days back, I received a letter from the ListingCorp Website Listing Service, requesting payment of $65 for my annual listing. At first glance, it looks exactly like a bill (though it does state that it is “not a bill”, if you look closely; definitely a pseudo-legal CYA there, and probably the only thing between them and a stay in Federal penitentiary for mail fraud).

It says that their website address listing “service” includes (among other stuff)

Domain name submission with up to 8 keywords / phrases to 20 established search engines.

and that this is for my “annual search engine listing”.

There’s only one way to exchange money for search engine position, and that’s to bid on keywords using the pay-per-click advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and so on. I don’t imagine $65 would buy me too many clicks, especially spread out over 8 keywords and multiple PPC accounts, and certainly not after ListingCorp get their cut.

Since this site is a non-profit venture right now, I have no intention of paying anyone for clicks, legitimate or not, and am happy to add content and await whatever organic search results eventually come my way.

Judging by the comments in this posting they’ve been trying to pull this stunt for a while now, and no doubt have succeeded in stealing money from some of the people they targeted.

Needless to say, I filed a mail fraud report, as they’re using the USPS to send out solicitations (made to look like bills) for a clearly fraudulent “service”.

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