Review:

Traffic Magnet

by Ed Kohler

August 12, 2003

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:

This one loads extremely slow. The only thing worst than spam is slow loading spam.

They used to look like this:

The real Sarah Williams?

Or 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 loose 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.

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