You can't always get what you want
but you get what you pay for

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I 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 would they know?) or order-viagra-online (again, how would 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.

Guaranteed top ten positions? The math doesn't work

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-served 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. Most search engines prefer finding new sites on their own, so having links from other sites can actually be better than submitting.

Can you name the top 100,000 search engines?

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 top 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 pornography and obscure sites, especially those mentioned earlier (why is everyone so worried 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.

If it sounds too good to be true...

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 who have had good experiences.

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