Dear website maintainers, editors, and eCommerce entrepreneurs:
Want a successful business? Then you’d better not deal with SubmitCore! They advertise themselves as a link-building service. I explain what a link-building service is about here, and also tell you how to do it yourself for free.
Just to reiterate, the whole point of guest-posting is to have your fine article hosted on an established website, while also linking back to your own website. Google sees the high-ranking authority site with a link to you and awards your site Pageranking points. But to be successful, your copy must be not just non-spammy, not just competent, but really great! Here is a knock-out article on Guest-Posting 101.
But some people would rather go through a paid service, and I have no truck with them. There are some good guest-posting services out there, and it is a legitimate business if done right. But don’t rely on Submit Core. I award them zero out of infinity stars, no points, last place in any contest that matters.
Now, I have not actually done business with SubmitCore. Instead, they tried to do business with me… if there is any “they” there and the whole thing isn’t just a bot. So let’s back up and I’ll share the whole story…
How I met SubmitCore…
So one of my freelance clients is DabConnection, a site about the cannabis business. This is why you hear me raving about pot half the time around here. It is a top-ten site in that niche, with organic search traffic upwards of ~400K /month. Being said, we get a LOT of guest post requests. It got so bad that the inbox was just a wall of desperate pleas every morning.
The boss pulls me aside (I am paraphrasing to save time and patience) and says, “Pete, I hate to pass up a good free guest post, but the idiots that clog the guest-post system make it impossible to read through. I’d need an army just to read all the spammy emails we get every day. Should I just ban all guest post requests forever, or do you have another solution?”
The solution I came up with: Make a filter page where the only possible way to get to the submissions inbox is to wade through a strict, oppressive, authoritarian instructions page. I composed this masterpiece, complete with a header honoring Hunter S. Thompson, the patron saint of cannabis bloggers.
And then (with an oath sworn as a veteran of the Scary Devil Monastery) I volunteered to man the gate at the other end of all that and sift what pops through. Remarkably, we have cut 90% of the chaff out of the system, but some persistent idiots still get through.
Which is how I met the COVID variant “Dan Baker” (almost certainly not a real person)…
Tracking Down a Time Waster
The typical time-waster performs automated searches for high-ranking sites and emails any address it can scrape, puling for a guest post slot. If you humor the time-waster, you will discover:
- they do not read directions
- they will ask you the same stupid question again and again
- they do not read your answer either
- if they somehow do submit copy to you, it will either be (a) copied from another source, or (b) illiterate garbage
- publishing either of the above two results risks getting you blacklisted by Google
“Dan Baker” at SubmitCore raised all the red flags, first of all by asking the number one question already answered on my “write for us” page: “Do you accept guest post submissions?” That gets you ignored.
Time-wasters have the perfect answer to being ignored. They’ll just send you follow-up emails. Again. And again. And again! So I got curious about the sender domain and checked it out.
Beware of Link-Building Services Which Can’t Compose a Competent Home Page
This is why reading skills are important. Let’s examine every red flag raised by SubmitCore…
Notice the final sentence, ironically “The link building sector is also flooded with cheap, ineffective SEO services looking to make a quick buck.” It is repeated THREE TIMES to fill out the paragraph! If you plug that exact sentence, in quotes, into Google search, you will find several other sites, some of them with Chinese titles. So this sentence was probably scraped from another spammy link-building site.
It gets better. The next paragraph features incomplete sentence fragments, lack of capitalization, continued repetition of the previously repeated sentence, and a general feeling that you’re having a stroke while trying to read it.
The section after that repeats more from the first couple sections. Clearly, this page was composed entirely by a bot. No human is this spastic. Even an extremely incompetent writer will not foul things up this much. Somewhere, there is a text-scraper script billed as “AI” which is cranking out bot-registered domains of this site-spam.
This is how you know that their work for you would be equally bogus. If this is how they present themselves, just imagine how damaging they will be to your reputation!
The rest of the site is not that different. There *are* some clearly written blog posts in the “blog” section, likely sweated out of some third-world hack on Fiverr for what, $2 each? But more spammy tactics abound, such as this snip from the “testimonials” page:
“The SubmitCore is always been special working with.” Really? Picture this: Not only does the “person” who allegedly submitted this comment have no communication skills, but the alleged “CEO” of SubmitCore had to select that testimonial for proud display on their site!
Proper English Is Important – Because Spam-Bots Don’t Know It!
The anti-intellectuals will howl in outrage at such a claim, but language skills are important. They are important because they help all of us, Google included, to tell spambots from real humans.
Search Engine Watch has an excellent guide to spotting spammy content, going by Google’s own guidelines. They provide ten examples, and note that in every case, the content of the spam pages are representative of the same “word salad” pattern I point out here. There is a difference between word salad and an ESL speaker; a person deficient in a given language may speak it inexpertly, but can still get out a struggling thought. A bot just scrambles the words out from a copied dictionary.
And no, we’re not talking about being a Grammar Nazi to the point where you condemn everybody who can’t judiciously place a semicolon. A typo here and there is normal human nature. Common sense clearly tells you when a text-generating robot is the author, with a little practice.
Naturally, I am a freelance blogger myself. So of course, I have a self-serving reason to point this stuff out: You ought to hire a professional like me rather than some cheap agency! But to be honest, I’m usually pretty booked, so 99% of you can go on with cheap agencies, that would be no skin off my snotlocker.
But please, do not fall for some spam-bot trick. If you give a spammy commerce site your credit card number, chances are good that they will rip you off and give you nothing. All these spam sites funnel into a handful of scammers whose only job is to waste your time and steal your money. We see them in every possible market. The Scam Directory has pages of these sites listed, including some that promise to sell drugs, guns, prostitutes, and even counterfeit money.
So really, even if you don’t get help from me, get help from an actual capable worker, OK? Your PSA of the day.
