As the title suggests, I wanted to let fellow users know of my recent frustrations and disgust!
Back in December 2008 my houses electrics went haywire, and I ended up calling in a local Electrician to fix it all, in return for payment he asked me to throw together a simple website, so he could add his own content and have a point of contact for potential customers to contact him... not a problem, I was glad because he just spent 2 whole days sorting my house out !!
I decided to set up the domain name that being www.copelands-electrical-services.com and then decided (seen as he spent 2 days on my house, I would spend some cash on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)) that being some Directory Submission to help build up his PR (Page Rank) faster.
So a quick Google search of "Directory Submission" brings up a site called www.SubmitEdge.com at the top so I decided to give them a shot...
I purchased a plan of 1250 Directory Submission for $175 (£110) for there service to submit approx 1250 links over the internet for me... I initially thought great !! going to save me loads of time and keep my client happy at the same time!!
Every week I received a nice lovely report from SubmitEdge saying where they had submitted the site to over the net, stating that they had submitted 100 links each week. Initially I didn't think anything of it nor did I check them, just saved them and forwarded them onto my client.
Just last week (some 4 months later) my client phoned me to say "Ive been checking some of these reports for my listings and I cant find many". So I asked him to come round so we could go over it together. I pulled out report number 2 and started from the top checking the listings.... I decided to check the first 10 and here were my results.
You can view the report here (opens in popup window)
- www.chronosroma.org (not listed)
- www.moviedigg.com (not listed)
- www.pianothing.com (not listed)
- www.tropucana.com (domain expired)
- www.whynotlink.com (not listed)
- www.searchnet.us (showing at http://www.searchnet.us/detail/link-36176.html)
- www.lllsss.com (domain expired)
- www.theaace.com (not listed)
- www.redhotdirectory.net (not listed)
- www.xef.in (domain expired)
So as you can see, only 1 link in 10 actually worked... I wasn't to impressed and nor was my client, after all we had payed for a service and we expected a good service.
I decided to do a Link Back check of the domain, and to my amazement I could only find a maximum of 124 links linking back to www.copelands-electrical-services.com hang on, but we have payed www.submitedge.com to submit 1250 ? what's going on ?
This linkback check confirmed that only 1 in 10 links work from the reports that they submitted to us (1250/10=125) e.g. I purchased 1250 links and only 124 linkbacks are on the internet today.
I contacted SubmitEdge, and they replied within 24hrs, but they wouldn't actually say what they had done or how they had done it, all they kept saying was check the reports we sent you...
I asked them to supply a link to a linkback service that they used to verify links and they pointed me to www.backlinkwatch.com so I entered the domain name and they told me there was only 76 sites linking to my clients site. My client wasn't very happy and could I get SubmitEdge to explain why?
Not a chance, the only reply they seemed to give was, please check the reports to see that the submissions were accepted. (says nothing in the reports about them being accepted) They also tried to say You need to search Google for "www.copelands-electrical-services.com" so I did, and only the first 2 pages of results were relevant to our site, and my client had submitted most of those results !!
I decided to open a PayPal claim, but because it had been longer than 45 days, they could not do anything, I guess the moral of the story in this case is, trust no one, and if you want a job doing properly do it your self !
I also did a little bit of Googling to see if they had done this kind of thing before and came across this very angry and annoyed site called SubmitEdge is a Scam
Would I recommend www.submitedge.com to anyone... what do you think !!
The worst thing about this incident is, even though I tried to resolve the situation nicely they have deleted my account on there site... very sad, and very misleading service. in fact its fraud !!
What else can I do? They have taken my money, sent us reports (even if only 1 in 10 links actually worked) and answered our support tickets, all seems very legit, but the fact of the matter is all this information seems to be collaborated to their advantage all be it financial.
I thought I would share this little bit of information, so hopefully no one else falls foul of a horrible sham or should that be scam ?!?
