Search Engine Submissions and Services - You Get What You Pay For

Article Posted 2002 September 22, Sunday
by Markus Hoevener - Bloofusion Group | Aptos, California | United States

I suppose I'm not the only person, whose mailbox is clogged up with junk mail. Do you know which ones I like best? In my opinion, junk mail from search engine services are 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 positions or submissions within 15 days, please remember the following paragraphs.

Guaranteed Top Ten Search Engine Positions

Having studied computer science, I approach this from a mathematical perspective. If eleven people were to order the guaranteed top ten positions, 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 engines 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 to the 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 of the search engines and directories worldwide, 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.

Submission to Thousands of 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 obscure sites. 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.

You Get What You Pay For

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 better search engine positions, while only charging you $11.99?

My piece of advice, either read up on the latest search engine trends yourself or go for a specialist and expect to pay more - and get more. 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 or consult a resource like the SEO Consultants Directory (/).

Markus Hoevener - Visit the Bloofusion Group Consultants Profile

Markus Hoevener is Chief Visionary of the Bloofusion Group, a company providing search engine visibility and online marketing services, with offices in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.

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Last modified: 2008-09-25T07:25:46-0700

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