The Search Engine Submission Scam, and What Actually Works

Some scams never die, they just change their wording. Register a domain name and there is a fair chance you will receive an official-looking email offering to submit your website to the search engines, or warning that your listing is about to expire, for a fee somewhere between fifty and several hundred pounds.

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It is a scam. The service either does not exist, or is something you can do yourself in two minutes for nothing.

What the email looks like

These have become considerably more polished than they were. The current variations are worth recognising:

Search engine submission. The classic. Offers to submit your site to hundreds of search engines. There are not hundreds of search engines that matter, and the ones that do find you without being asked.

Expiring listing or expiring SEO. Framed as a renewal so it looks like something you already have. You do not.

Domain expiry notice. Designed to look like a renewal invoice from your registrar. Sometimes it is an attempt to transfer your domain to another registrar at an inflated price rather than a pure fake.

Trademark or domain protection. “Someone in another country is trying to register your brand name, contact us urgently.” Nobody is.

Free SEO audit. An automated report full of alarming red warnings, most of which are meaningless, followed by an offer to fix them.

Directory listing invoices. An invoice for a listing you never ordered, in the hope that a busy finance department pays it.

The common thread is urgency, an official tone, and a payment page.

Why they know you just registered a domain

This has changed since we first wrote about it. It used to be straightforward: registrant contact details were published in public WHOIS records and were scraped continuously.

Since GDPR, registrars redact personal data from public WHOIS, so that particular tap has largely been turned off. The senders now work from other sources: newly issued TLS certificates are published in public Certificate Transparency logs, which is an excellent way to spot a brand new site; zone files and newly registered domain lists are commercially available; and contact addresses are simply scraped from websites.

Worth knowing, because people often assume a scam email means their registrar leaked something. It usually does not.

What to do with them

Do not pay. Obviously, but the whole business model depends on a small percentage of recipients paying, so it is worth saying.

Do not click the links. Including, and especially, the unsubscribe link. A legitimate sender does not send unsolicited commercial email in the first place, and clicking unsubscribe confirms your address is live and read, which makes it more valuable to sell on.

Do not reply. Same reason.

Just delete it. If your business has staff who might act on an invoice, tell them these exist, because the directory listing variant is aimed squarely at whoever pays the bills rather than whoever runs the website.

If you are genuinely unsure whether one of these is real, read the message headers. Whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed for the domain in the visible From address, and whether the Reply-To matches it, usually settles it in under a minute.

In the UK you can report them to Action Fraud, and forward phishing emails to [email protected].

What actually gets you into search engines

Here is the part that has genuinely changed since the original version of this article. The manual submission URLs we used to link to are both gone. Google retired its public submit-URL tool, and Bing’s standalone submit page went the same way. Anyone offering to use them is offering something that does not exist.

The current answer is better and still free:

Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify ownership of your site in each. This is the actual replacement, and it gives you far more than submission ever did: which queries you appear for, which pages are indexed, and what is stopping the rest.

Submit an XML sitemap in both. This is how you tell search engines what exists, and it matters most on a shop with a deep catalogue where crawlers may not reach everything by following links.

Use URL inspection for individual pages. Search Console lets you request indexing for a specific URL, which is useful for a new or substantially changed page. It is a request, not a guarantee.

Consider IndexNow for a site that changes often. It is an open protocol, supported by Bing and several other engines, that pings them when a page is added or updated rather than waiting for a crawl. Several SEO plugins support it with a checkbox.

Then get linked to. This is the one that actually matters. Search engines find pages by following links, so a single link from any indexed site will do more than any submission ever did.

The uncomfortable truth about submission

Being indexed and ranking are different things, and the scam trades on the confusion between them.

Getting into the index is easy, free and largely automatic. Ranking for anything competitive takes useful content, a site that works properly, and time. Nobody can sell you the second thing as a one-off fee, and anyone offering to is telling you what you want to hear.

If a new site has not appeared in search after a couple of weeks, the problem is almost never that you failed to submit it. It is usually something concrete and findable: the site is blocking crawlers in robots.txt, a staging site’s noindex tag was carried across to production, or there are no links to it anywhere. All three show up in Search Console, which is free, and which is what the people emailing you are charging for.

We also offer SEO and marketing help if you would rather not do it yourself. If you host with us and want a hand getting Search Console set up or working out why a page is not being indexed, just ask.