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suppose I'm not the only person, whose mailbox is clogged up with
junk mail. Do you know which ones I like best? Not the improve-your-sex-life
(how do they know?) or order-viagra-online (again, how do they know?)
or make-a-million (why don't THEY make a million, retire and stop
sending this junk?). In my opinion, junk mail from search engine services
is the worst yet funniest.
Unfortunately, I encounter many people who have fallen for those
services and didn't get what they were promised. Don't get me wrong:
There are many serious services out there, which are worth every
cent. Actually, I work for one, and we have a hard time differentiating
us from all the scam artists. If you ever see services that offer
"guaranteed top ten position" or "submission within
15 days", please remember the following paragraphs.
Having studied computer science, I approach this from a mathematical
perspective. If eleven people were to order the "guaranteed
top ten position", how would that work? Would it be first-come-first-serve
or could eleven webmasters decide to drop the worst web site (good
idea for a new game show)? Some of the major search engines update
their indexes every two months. So how could anyone guarantee being
listed in the search engine within two weeks? Besides, submitting
your URL to search engines does not guarantee anything. Some search
engines prefer finding new sites on their own, so having links from
other sites can actually be better than submitting.
Submitting your site to 100,000 search engines and directories
sounds good, doesn't it? The more, the better, right? I haven't
taken out the time to count all search engines and directories world
wide, but I do not think, that anybody would ever find 100,000,
or even 10,000. Taking a look at my server logs, I can see that
more than 90% of my traffic comes from the major search engines,
most notably Google. That makes you wonder: How important can it
be to be listed on the Botswana Site Directory? Your investment
would most definitely be spent more wisely if it were used for optimizing
your Google ranking instead.
Some services offer a submission to thousands of so-called FFA
(Free For All) pages. These are link pages that everyone can submit
a web site to. Again, initially this sounds good, but if you ever
find time to take a look at an FFA page, you will see a wild mixture
of porn and obscure sites, especially those mentioned earlier (why
does everyone worry about my sex life?). Should your business web
site be listed there? Even if you don't have a good reputation to
lose, FFA pages can affect your search engine ranking negatively:
Google is believed to penalize sites found on such pages by decreasing
their ranking or even worse by removing them completely.
This leads me to my headline: You get what you pay for! Do you
really think, that a professional site promotion specialist will
take a look at your site, create a personalized three page report
with detailed instructions on how to get a better search engine
position while only charging you $11.99?
My piece of advice: Either read up on the latest search engine
trends yourself and use an off-the-shelf software such as WebPosition
Gold or go for a specialist and expect to pay more - and get more.
Static software can hardly replace experience and ingenuity. Of
course, finding a good SEO (search engine optimization) specialist
can be hard, as there are no standards for this profession. The
best way to find a trustworthy specialist is to ask other webmasters
and site owners.
Markus Hoevener (markus@bloofusion.com) is Chief Visionary of the
Bloofusion Group (www.bloofusion.com),
a company providing search engine visibility and online marketing
services, with offices in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.
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