08/09/2003
Andy Jones
www.724leads
If there is one thing I hate it is someone
who gains through deceptive practices - in other words a liar or
a thief!
One of the first challenges anyone faces when deciding to
develop a web site is wading through all the BAD Search Engine
Optimization advice to arrive at the truth. It is even
worse when you pay good money for BAD advice -- and even worse
yet when this BAD advice may get you banned from the search
engines. I was checking through my Google listings today and ran
across a web site that has such BAD advice, it just plain pissed
me off. These folks are passing themselves off as search engine
optimization experts and charging $1000 dollars per month and
you have to sign up for a six month subscription!! ALL of their
advice is BAD news -- so much so that refuting their claims one
by one in this article will serve as a tremendous educational
article. ANYTHING PREFACED BY "BAD ADVICE", HIGHLIGHTED
IN BOLD IS FROM THEIR WEB SITE-- DON'T CONFUSE IT WITH
LEGITIMATE ADVICE.
Here we go:
BAD ADVICE: "A) 800,000 submissions of your home page once
a week for six consecutive months to search engines,
directories, FFAs, and other free listing web sites. Which gets
your home page submitted 19.2 million times during the 6 month
campaign."
When you first upload your web site to the server, no one
knows you are on the web. The way users and search engines find
out about you is through links. Initially, you may want to
submit your site to Dmoz or Joe Ant or Gimpsy. Heck, you may
even want to do a pay for inclusion (PFI) with Inktomi to get
the ball rolling.
HERE is a great little article on PFI. Once you get a few
links, the search engine spiders will find you. Submitting over
and over to the same search engines is useless and may get you
banned!
BAD ADVICE: "B) We'll develop 250 competitively engineered
sets of highly-ranked Search Engine keyword phrases for use in
your MetaTags that you will approve to be used throughout this
marketing campaign."
MetaTags are DEAD. Google doesn't
use them anymore and the rest of the real search engines
are abandoning them in short order. The reason? They were
too easily manipulated by people using less than ethical search
engine optimization.
BAD ADVICE: "C) We'll then create (10) ten automatic redirect
front doors using the 250 competitively engineered sets of
highly-ranked Search Engine keyword phrases for your site. (This
requires access to your server to upload these web pages. These
pages will be hidden from all browsers and only seen by search
engine spiders. Your customers and competition will never know
they exist) "
Anything to do with "front doors"
and "redirects" and "hidden pages" is unethical search engine
optimization-period! All you have to do is ask the one
question : DOES THIS BENEFIT MY USERS? If the answer
is no, chances are you are doing something the search engines
will consider illegal. Here is what the
Google
Webmaster FAQ has to say:
"Another
illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with
keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this
will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is
inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for
a wide range of keywords. More insidious however, is that these
doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other
clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link
popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other
clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal
content."
BAD ADVICE: D) We'll then use these 250 highly-ranked
keyword phrases for target marketing with the submission process
to 800,000 search engines (These 10 hidden pages containing the
250 different keyword phrases will be submitted to the search
engines one page every 3 days over the six month period) Which
gets these 10 pages submitted 480 million times during the 6
month campaign.
Man, it just keeps getting worse! These thieves have
testimonials on their page from "satisfied" users and the also
have results of their "effective" keyword campaigns. Each and
every one of their keyword phrases are low traffic/low
competition phrases. I did some checking and the phrases
indicate less than 100 searches per month and generally the
competition shows as less than 200,000 pages. ANYONE can
do some basic optimization with information freely available on
the internet and get good results for these non-competitive
phrases. The traffic is going to be minimal and not worth the
effort.
BAD ADVICE: E) We'll also research your Top 5 competitors
listed within the Top search engines in order for us to analyze
and help you beat your competition
Once we know who your Top competition is, We'll then use their keyword
phrases for target marketing with the submission process to
800,000 search engines (We'll develop 10 hidden
pages containing the competition keyword phrases will be
submitted to the search engines one page every 3 days over the
six month period) Which gets these 10 pages submitted 480
million times during the 6 month campaign.
I agree with part of this-really. I also look at my
competition to see what they are using for keyword phrases but
unless I copy their keyword phrases, their adcopy AND duplicate
their back links, I am not going to get the same results.
And here these thieves are again, saying they are going to
develop yet another 10 hidden pages to drive traffic. You
want to get banned from Google? Follow their advice and I
will bet that is the end result. From the
Google FAQ :
"The term "cloaking" is used to describe a
website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling
the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return
different content to Google than it returns to regular users,
usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This
can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a
search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our
search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any
sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their
search rankings."
BAD ADVICE: F) We'll also create two hidden index pages of
your 250 highly ranked keyword phrases that are linked to all
the hidden pages we've developed so that the spiders can
continue to index all of these pages. These index pages will be
submitted to the 800,000 search engines, directories, FFAs, and
other free listing web sites every 3 days over the six month
campaign. Which gets these two index pages submitted 96 million
times during the 6 month campaign.
Why would anyone with any common sense think hidden index
pages are anything but an attempt to fool the search engines?
These people are just preying on the uninformed and naive.
BAD ADVICE: G) Our program also gets you listed with Yahoo at
no extra charge! (Your Yahoo listing becomes available once the
search engines update their indexes each quarter)
The only way to get listed in the Yahoo DIRECTORY is to pay
them $299. This is a misleading statement because they are
obviously referring to the Google listings that Yahoo displays
as search results. Why pay for something that is free? These
people will have to do absolutely NOTHING to get listed in
Yahoo.
And here are their final, closing 2 paragraphs:
"After six months of our service your site will have been
submitted over 1.07 Billion times to search engines,
directories, FFAs, and other free web sites, giving you both
competitively engineered sets of highly-ranked Search Engine
keyword phrases, competition buster listings, and sponsored
listing in the top 80% of all search engines. This program will
get you results and tons of traffic.
This is a monthly subscription
service. All services on this page are billed monthly at the
$1,000 per month rate. We will initially bill you for the first
month of this service and then every 30 days form the original
order date. Access to your server is required to upload our
files and when closing the account we also need access to remove
the files. (Billing continues during the use of our services.)
"
So, I guess you can ask now what is GOOD Search Engine
Optimization? Go back to the question "Will my users
benefit from this information, this page, this addition?" If you
can say yes, it is usually good SEO. Research your
keywords, make your navigation clear and easy and provide
content, LOTS OF MEANINGFUL CONTENT. and the desirable search
engine results will come.
