No Guaranteed Search Engine Ranking

Posted by Norm on April 11, 2009

Have you ever received emails that claim to put your web site at the top of the search engine rankings?  I get them frequently and thought I’d do a little investigating.  It’s amazing how many “SEO Experts” are out there and their own web sites are no where near the top search engine listings.

First let’s look at their own marketing technique. They simply SPAM thousands of email addresses with their email message. Actually this is against the law, which is why the return email address is usually a throw away from Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo. They hope to get a few new customers before their email IDs are disabled.

How can they guarantee top #1 rankings? The guarantee is usually for your unique website domain name, or a very obscure key phrase that no one else would use. Of course, no one would ever search for these key phrases either.

Although there may be a handful of SEO experts that offer a guarantee, but the majority are scams. Search engines do not divulge their proprietary ranking algorithms, thus how can someone guarantee where Google, Yahoo or MSN will rank your website.  Make sure to read all of the guarantee fine print, then prepare to walk away.

How about the offer to submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines & directories.  The fact is that Google, Yahoo and MSN are the only search engines that really count.  You can submit your web site to these engines, but they basically use webbots and spyder programs to gather web info.  They will “crawl” your web site anyway, and submitting the site vs being crawled provides no ranking advantage.

It has been documented that “spamming” your submissions and frequent resubmissions to hundreds of engines and directories can hurt your major search engine rankings.  Many of these submissions are to “link farms” , which can throw up a red flag to Google and may cause your web site to be penalized.

Be cautious of those claims of great rankings without having to modify your web site.  There are legitimate link building strategies to help improve page rank, but they are time consuming and require experience.  Throwing links on non-relavent web sites will have little effect, and may have an adverse effect.

There are as many unethical SEO practices as there are unethical so called SEO experts.  If you get an unsolicited email offering outrageous claims of search engine ranking improvements, your best reaction will be to delete the email and forget it.