Attention: Important Notice / Domain Service Notice
We received several of these notices lately (shown right), which demands a minimum $75 to be paid for an annual “search submission” service. The official-looking notice includes our postal and email addresses, and warns that it’s time to “send in your registration”.
The demanding language includes “Attention: important notice”, “Failure to complete your domain name search engine registration…” and “Do not discard…” – making it all sound rather important!
However, read more into it, and this request is complete nonsense and you can safely ignore it – it’s just a spam message!
Search engine registration is a one-off event, which we do for our customers’ websites when registering a new domain name, so that Google and Bing can find your new site. However, once a search engine knows about a website, they’ll come back and index your site every few days, so there’s no need to “register” the site again. Even if you launch a redesigned website, as long as the domain name has stayed the same, there shouldn’t be any need to notify the search engines of your existence – they’ll continue to visit and index your domain name at regular intervals.
In the rare case that your website isn’t listed in Google and Bing, you can use these free links below to add your website to their indexes:
You never need to “renew” your search engine listing and nor do you have to pay to be listed in Google or Bing’s normal results.
And if you’re wondering how they got our address details, this is actually publicly available on the WHOIS database, which lists the administrative contact for all domain names, so it doesn’t take much effort to do a mail merge!
So this request email is nothing more than a con. If you read carefully, you’ll also notice the email we received says “you are under no obligation to pay the amounts… unless you accept this offer.”
Mike founded Primary Image in 2010. He specialises in the WordPress website platform and speaks regularly at national web design conferences. Mike became a member (MCIPR) of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in 2015.