How to Spot a Psychopath

Reply-To: peter.kramer@mplw.com
From: "Peter Kramer" <peter.kramer@mplw.com@gt;
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Sitemap File missing - http://www.dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:24:25 +0200

As I was on http://www.dansdata.com this morning, I was unable to locate a "Google Sitemap file" on your website.

I am not referring to a regular "site map" for people to visit online, but rather to a script called "Google Sitemap file" which helps Google to read and index your website overall content. I advise you to visit us online where we explain clearly what is a "Google Sitemap file" and what you need to do to get one: http://www.sitemapfile.net

A Sitemap file is a "script/code" placed in the root directory of your website which captures all the crucial information about your website, thus facilitating the crawling and indexing process for Google. We can set up your Google Sitemap file for $125 should you need help to do so.

If Google takes the time to publish a page titled "What is a Sitemap file and why do I need one?", it is obvious that every responsible online marketer should take action accordingly.
Read what Google says about Sitemap file and why you need one: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318

Regards,

Peter Kramer, Ph.D.
peter.kramer@mplw.com

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL: 1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.com:
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

Even if I didn't regard being described as an "online marketer" as a deep personal insult, it would still be my considered opinion that this service is a rip-off.

As other people have observed (after getting this same offer for sites that apparently already have a sitemap...), making a sitemap is likely to be a semi-automated process that takes about 15 minutes.

That makes $US125 for making one a pretty good hourly rate. Even before you notice that they're apparently offering four different and separate kinds of $125 sitemap - Google, MSN, Yahoo and "General". Only $375 if you order all four!

I can see nothing in the sitemap format that actually requires those files to be different for different search services. And since April 2007, Google, Yahoo and MSN have supported automatic "discovery" of sitemap files via a simple robots.txt entry. So you don't even have to manually submit your sitemap URL to get it noticed. Not that the submission process was ever difficult enough to justify a separate fee.

And there's more.

Global Vibration (insert joke here...) aren't even selling you an automatic-updating sitemap service.

As far as I can tell after reading their mildly illiterate FAQ, they'll just make one lousy XML file and then, I guess, charge you another $125 if you want more addresses added to it and aren't smart enough to twig to the fact that you can edit the thing yourself.

And, furthermore, dansdata.com has no need for a sitemap file, as a cursory examination of the site reveals.

The basic purpose of a sitemap is to make it easier for search engine spiders to find dynamically created pages that can't easily be located by just "clicking on links".

Web forums, for instance, are difficult to effectively spider. If you've for some reason decided to use a Flash interface for your site navigation, that'll also stymie spiders.

Google spiders all of the pages on Dan's Data with no trouble whatsoever, though. Google also discovers new pages on my site within hours, if not minutes. I used to manually submit new pages to Google just to make sure, but they show up in searches just as quickly if I don't.

Dan's Data also has zillions of incoming links from other sites. Even if I deleted my huge full index page and all of my intra-site links, most if not all of my pages would still be regularly spidered.

And I don't have any "dynamic" pages at all. Dansdata.com is a good old fashioned flat-file site.

That makes it painful if I want to change an element on every page - I have to re-upload the entire site, which at the moment means about 36Mb of HTML - but it reduces the load on my server. And it also makes the site trivially easy to spider, since every URL is simple and static and there's no half-baked Content Management System shuffling stuff around.

Dansdata.com has been around since 1998, and has a PageRank of 6. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Global Vibration claim to have been providing "Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999" (http://www.mseo.com/ and http://www.globalvibration.com/ have apparently only existed since 2001...), their own site currently has a PageRank of... zero!

I would also like to propose a General Rule of Credibility: Anybody who puts "Ph.D." after their name whe they're trying to get you to buy something is less likely to be on the level than someone with no letters after their name.

If I were uncharitable, I might wonder where Peter Kramer got his doctorate. I might also wonder what discipline it was in.