Update, June 7, 2006: Domain Listing Center is also a scam, see this comment.

So, yesterday, I got some more spam-by-mail. This time from a company who just identifies themselves as LISTINGCORP.COM and then “Website Listing Service.”

Basically these people want me to pay them to list one of my domains “to 20 major search engines” with “eight keyword / phrase listings” and “quarterly search engine position and ranking reports.” All this for the very low price of $50.00 for one year starting April 21st!! </sarcasm>

But you know what? There is no phone number for this company anywhere on this “notice.” There’s their website: listingcorp.com and the email address info@listingcorp.com. I know this because I looked all over it for a number to call and demand they take me off their list. So I look at their website and click the “contact” link. I’m presented with three email addresses and the following message:

Please contact us via Email:

General Information – info@listingcorp.com
Billing Questions – billing@listingcorp.com
Technical Support – support@listingcorp.com

Due to current large volumes of email, requests can take up to 10 business days to receive a reply.

Ten business days!?
Of course, I know that it’s pointless to try and contact them by email. For one, I’m sure that after ten days they will neither respond nor will I remember anything about them. And for two, the last thing I want to do is give them a valid email address for me.

The really ironic thing? This is for a domain that’s not mine, only registered by me – so, of course, they got my info from the whois. And the domain name has 2006 in it. If they had actually looked at the domain name, they’d see that by April 21, 2006, the function of the domain will have ceased (as it will on April 7th), this is obvious as soon as you visit the site. Just goes to show you they’re trying to get anyone and everyone to fall for this scam.

The really sad thing? There are people that will fall for this. I have a specific person in mind as I write this. I’ve done their website but they registered their own domain name, so their own info is going to be on the whois. So eventually they’re going to start getting mailings like this and the registration scam I’ve talked about before and they are the kind of people who are likely to fall for this type of thing. So, off I go to compose an email…

Oh, so you people who want to be in search engines? Try some meta tags instead:

<meta http-equiv=”Pragma” content=”no-cache” />
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”0″ />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords here” />
<meta name=”description” content=”site description here” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”Index, Follow” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex, nomediaindex” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive” />
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”5 Days” />

Edit them to read the values you want. There are more, of course, but start here. I actually know very little about search engine optimization, but I do know that whatever I’m doing seems to work well. ;-)