Removing SeekOn Listings and Links
SeekOn customers occasionally ask to remove SeekOn listings and associated link(s) to one of their web sites. In this case you can understand that we need to insure that the removal request is from the site owner and not a competitor or disgruntled ex-employee. Therefore please follow this procedure:
Use the SeekOn comment form to request the removal of your listing. Specify the exact URL of your site, and the SeekOn page(s) on which your listing appears. If it is available, provide your SeekOn Customer ID number for the listing. Otherwise provide the company name and the name, full title, and email address, of the company official requesting the removal and indicate that this individual has the authority to request the removal. The email address (will be verified) must be a company email address (Joe.Blow@yourcompany.com) corresponding to your URL (e.g. www.yourcompany.com) and not a generic email address (Joe.Blow@gmail.com). Alternately, we will also accept a letter on company letterhead signed by a company official authorized to request the removal. Send the letter to: SeekOn Directory, Box 239, Crownsville, MD 21032.
Search Engine Issues -- The SeekOn Directory is NOT Artificial or Unnatural!
Some website owners have received a communication from a search engine to the effect that their site "may be using techniques outside our webmaster guidelines" including "artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site" and are concerned that a SeekOn listing or listing on any other directory might be considered "artificial" or, worse yet, "unnatural," whatever that means. Perhaps the search engine could decide to punish the owner of the web site by reducing its page rank. However SeekOn has been operating since 1999, provides an obviously useful service to residents and visitors in more than 15,000 cities and towns in North America, and is clearly not, by any possible stretch of the imagination, "artificial" or "unnatural." In addition, SeekOn reviews listing requests to screen out spam and ensure that links our users see are of high quality. If you receive such a vague notice you should ask for more specifics as to the particular offending incoming links and the nature of their offense. Keep in mind that essentially any web site of any significance is listed in various directories and other sources of information. Popular sites have hundreds of incoming links, over which they have no control.
Google and other search engines do use incoming links to a page as part of their algorithm that determines page rank in search results. Some web site owners "game" this aspect of search engine algorithms by placing links on pages having nothing to do with the linked page, or worse, having no purpose whatsoever except to temporarily fool search engines. Other techniques involve putting links on parts of pages unlikely to be seen by human visitors, using small link type, using link text color the same as background, or other activities intended to fool search engines and not intended for human visitors. Sleazy operators continuously establish new domains for this purpose. As we all know all too well, search results still link to many useless sleazy sites despite the continuing best efforts of search engines to suppress them and the machine-generated site descriptions in search results are frequently misleading. One of the benefits of using a reviewed directory like SeekOn is the higher quality of the listings and links.
Search engines can easily adjust the algorithm weight given to incoming links from any long-established sites like SeekOn according to any secret criteria they choose. In other words, links coming from long-established domains like seekon.com, yahoo.com, nytimes.com, or blogspot.com, etc. are not a problem for search engines.
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