“I received an email about the expiration of my search engine registration. Should I pay this bill?”

I get questions about these kind of emails all the time. Often they are spam and scammers trying to get a few bucks out of you! But let’s do some research first just to be sure.

Let’s look into your domain name and figure out where it is registered. Most likely you registered your domain several months or even years ago so it’s best not to just rely on your memory. Go to the website, www.whois.com and type in your domain name. This should show you all the contact info about your domain. Even if your contact info is made private, it should show you what company the domain is registered with.

Now look at that email again. Is it the same company? If not, it is spam! The domain registrar (who you paid to purchase the domain) is the only company who you are required to pay. Anyone else is usually offering fake services and trying to scam you!

But just to be doubly sure, let’s break down the services they are offering. According to the email, they were providing “submission and search engine ranking for domain owners.” Submission to what? Search engines? The same search engines who are constantly crawling the internet looking for sites? While it is useful to submit your site when you first built it or when you make major changes, this is not something you need to pay for or something that you need to do a regular basis. SCAM again.

Let’s look at the second part: Search Engine Ranking. This term is pretty ambiguous. Every website receives a google page rank wherein google ranks your website. This happens for every website whether you know it or not. Again it is not a service you need to pay for or renew.

So now that we have decided that the email is spam, what do we do about it? Nothing. Just ignore it. Spam email is an unavoidable evil. The best defense is learning how to identify spam and what to do about it.