This week !
Classified Ads - (A directory of nothing but spam)
Much like a newspaper Classified Ad section, there are hundreds if not thousands of places online you can submit a “website promotional” classified Ad to promote your business. Unfortunately, the format of these things simply invites severe spamming as a few hundred webmasters out there will continuously spam each single Ad millions of times, sometimes daily, to the same directory!
You may have never seen one of these things because they are hidden away where human eyes would not likely go. They are most usually stumbled upon from the other side, when some scam artist sells a newbie an “Ad Blasting” or some similar ploy guaranteeing that the poor guy’s listing will be posted in thousands of different places.
On the bright side, such a listing is placed in a category so that any resulting traffic would be semi-targeted. Also, Ads are instantly posted to these automatic boards, so any traffic would be instant as well. But that’s where my enthusiasm ends. Since there are so many Ads coming in, yours will only stay on the top page for a few seconds, if that long. To my knowledge, no one has ever read one of those horrible, spammy ads and no one in their right mind ever will.
Search Engines avoid these locations like the plague and being found in them can actually HURT your Search Engine rankings! Quite likely, these listings will likely do more harm for your site than good. I highly recommend keeping your distance.