Exposing SEO Company Atrocities
If you read the What To Expect From SEO Feed post, then you won't be surprised by this entry. In fact, one of my goals for publishing this blog is to expose these types of services and save unsuspecting webmasters and site owners hundreds of dollars.
I got a solo mailing from SEO News today and I thought I was going to be sick. A slick, full-page color ad promising to "Get Your Site Listed in 48 Hours, Guaranteed!" Immediately, my bulls*&t detector started flashing. It's not that you can't get listed in 48 hours, the question is: how much are they charging and what are they actually doing?
They charge you $99.95 a month to submit your site to the search engines and update your title, description and keyword meta tags. They also provide ranking reports (by request) and a bunch of other great stuff I'm sure.
So, I went through their guarantee and decided that it would be useful to show my readers how everything they claim to do can be done for free or very low-cost. No need to pay $99.95 a month. I've only used a few of the guarantees in this post, please visit their site for the complete list of claims.
Guarantee #1:
In 48 hours or less (many times the same business day!), your site will begin to show up in many of the web's most important search engines and content sites, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask.com, AltaVista, Excite, InfoSpace, NBCi, CNET and many others. No other service is able to match this claim.
Ok, let's talk about indexing for a minute. All you need is a link from a high PageRank (PR) site to get your site indexed quickly. That's it. High PR sites are crawled multiple times a day and if you find a link from one of them, your site will get indexed in a matter of hours.
If you have a good linking structure on your site, then your whole site will get indexed. By good linking structure, I mean all the pages link to each other and vice versa.
Now, you may be saying, "Where do I get a high PR link instantly?" Easy. CraigsList. Go to CraigsList and post an ad. Try to make it useful. Never abuse a great thing, otherwise it disappears. Include your URL in the ad and you'll be indexed before you know it. Your ad will expire in 7 days, but the ad isn't what you're after, you are just trying to get indexed.
But, CraigsList is so Web 1.0.
Let's try another way. All of the Web 2.0 story submission sites have great PR. It's just a fact of life. Now, if you submit a story to Digg, Reddit or Netscape you may not be on the front page long enough for the search engines (namely Google) to notice.
So, search out the smaller sites where the submissions are less frequent. There are hundreds of these sites, but my favorites are ContentPop, HypeDiss and BlogMemes. Submit a story there and participate in the community; you'll be amazed at the results you get.
Oh, and a quick note on all the search engines they mention. Who cares? Google got 63% of the search market share in February 2007. Why would you even worry about the other engines?
Guarantee #2:
That's only the beginning! We then submit your site, using our superior proprietary submission software, to every other search engine on the planet that matters, and re-submit every 30 days thereafter (click here to see the complete list). We submit to Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask.com, and all applicable international versions of these engines. Your site will be submitted by hand using our superior proprietary software, and we review all submissions for accuracy, efficiency and completeness.
Ok, the phrase I want to focus on here is, "superior proprietary software." Could that proprietary software be Internet Business Promoter? This software will do everything they are claiming and then some. Once again, I'm just speculating. I don't know what they use for tracking and submission.
Another interesting thing to note is that there is absolutely NO reason to submit your site to search engines. Never, no matter what! The last time that was effective I was still in high-school.
Guarantee #3:
You may update your site name, description, keywords or any other information, with absolutely no cost or headache, an unlimited number of times (existing customers click here for Client Tools).
This is a good little feature to have for customers. I'm sure you enter your FTP information and then you can make updates to your meta tags. But, is that worth $99.95 a month. Microsoft Notepad and a free FTP program will accomplish just the same.
Guarantee #4:
At your request, we will provide you with a free report of where your site places in a select group of the top search engines and directories.
Now, we are talking about ranking reports. Internet Business Promoter will do this also, but say you don't want to spend the money and buy it. As always, free solutions exist. Digital Point has a very capable and useful ranking checker that costs you absolutely nothing.
After dissecting this company and what they do, I want to make a few things clear.
Do you feel a disclaimer coming?
This post in no way reflects the owners of the company or the service they provide. In other words, I'm not trying to get sued for slander. Everything here is just my opinion. That's it. Their site has dozens of testimonials from happy customers and I am inclined to believe they are real.
I'm sure they provide the exact service they claim to provide and I have no reason to believe they are shady. Most importantly, I have never used them personally.
What do you think?