Who is Sarah Williams of TrafficMagnet?

Have you ever received an email from Sarah Williams or Christine
Hall of Traffic Magnet? If you have a website and an email address
you probably have. We receive around an email a week like this
from TrafficMagnet. They're also often forwarded to us from clients
asking whether this service is worth using. Hopefully this puts
the issue to rest for our clients and anyone else who stumbles
across this page.

Lately, the emails have looked like this:

The real Sarah Williams?

They used to look like this:

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

Ten things you should know about Sarah Williams and TrafficMagnet.

1. There is no Sarah Williams. The site is
   hosted by a company called PDHost which
   doesn't exist at their stated location in Silicon Valley.


2. 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. TrafficMagnet 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 messageboards they've posted their spam on.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. TrafficMagnet is clearly spamming website owners. Here
   is a link to over
   400 posts on Google Groups from other website owners who
   share our opinion on this. Not surprisingly, the majority of
   those posts reside in the following groups:
   
   news.admin.net-abuse.sightings
   
   news.admin.net-abuse.email
   
   alt.kill.spammers
   
   alt.spam


7. 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.


8. Never trust a company that doesn't place a physical
   address or phone number on their web site.


9. By submitting your site to thousands of 3rd, 4th, 5th tier
   and beyond websites, 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 lose more than
   $20/month in productivity cleaning your inbox.


10. 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 trafficmagnet emails directly to the trash.