Google Filters, how to get around them and exploit their loop holes

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I have been doing SEO for some time now and I have been witness to many a strange occurrence regarding serps. Most of these weird occurrence I would have to say are directly attributed to a Google Filter or Google penalty. So I have been inspired by a post over at webmasterworld and as far as I know there is not a current list out online that list’s all of the potential Google penalties so I have decided to put together an arbitrary list of potential Google Penalties. Please note that there is no proof i.e. press release from Google stating these exist but rather these are ideas, theories and assumptions from SEO’s experiences.

Google Sandbox: The Sandbox Filter is usually applied to brand new websites but has been seen to be applied to domains that have been around for a while. Since most websites do not make it past a year Google implemented a filter that will prevent a new site from getting decent rankings for competitive keyword terms. Usually brand new sites can still rank for non competitive keyword terms though.

How to work around the Sandbox: Google uses a system called trust rank. The idea behind trust rank is if authority sites link to your new site then you must be an authority site as well and since Google trust’s these older more respected sites it will trust your’s as well. Hence getting you out of the sandbox right away. That is not an easy thing to do so if you are not able to get these links then try expanding your content to rank for many more less competitive keywords and keyword phrases (long tail keywords).

Google -30: This Google filter is applied to site’s who use spammy seo tactics. When Google find you using doorway pages, java redirects etc then they will drop your rankings by 30 spots.

How to get around this: If you find yourself a victim of the Google -30 filter then usually just removing the spam elements on your site will get you back in. You can always fill out a request for re-inclusion is worse comes to worse. Here are some resources for the Google -30. Arelis, Threadwatch, SERoundtable.

Google Bombing: Google Bombing is a filter applied to sites who gain a large number of inbound links with the same anchor text. This raises a red flag to Google as it is extremely unnatural for an inbound linking structure to all have the exact same anchor text.

How to work around this: If your site actually has this filter applied then most likely you have been banned from the search engines and a re-inclusion request is probably your best bet. If the filter is not applied but through your monitoring you see this potential then you might want to go back and request people change your anchor text, buy some links with varying anchor text etc. Here are some resources for Google Bombing. Search Engine Watch, NYTimes, Google Blogspot.

Google Bowling: This is not really a filter as much as it is a series of black hat techniques that will get you banned. Usually people use this term in reference to competition or a page/site they want OUT of the serps. Google bowling is usually only effective to site’s that are much new with lower trust rank. Trying to do this to a large site with high trust rank is going to be virtually impossible.

How to get around this: Google says that there is nothing a competitor can do to drop YOUR rankings. Many seo’s do not believe this and if you seoblackhat sells services for something like this. Re-inclusion request is basically your only option. Here are some resources for Google Bowling. Web Pro News, ThreadWatch and SEroundtable.

Google Duplicate Content Filter: A duplicate content filter is applied to sites who take content that has already been created, cached and indexed on other sites. News sites are usually exempt from the duplicate content filter via a hand job. Usually the pages that have this applied are not ranked very well in the serps. Page Rank can be devalued and if a page does not have inbound links you could see your results being put into omitted search results and supplemental results.

How to get through this: If you find yourself in this filter then your first step can be trying to remedy the duplicate content. Contact the person stealing your content and ask them to remove it. You can contact the persons web host to see if they will take down there site and the last resort is “trying” to contact Google and alert them of what is going on. Keep on top of your content by using copyscape to check for duplicate content.

Google Supplemental Results: Google supplemental results take pages on your site that have been indexed and put them into a sub database in Google. Supplemental results do not rank well but rather Google uses its supplemental DB to populate its results when they don’t have enough results to show in a given query. This means pages on your site in Google’s supplemental DB will not help you in the serps.

How to get through this: Its pretty simple actually. Just get some inbound links to your pages. Check this post out to find out more about the Google Poo (supplemental results).

Google Domain name Age Filter: The Google domain name age filter is closely related to trust rank and the sandbox but it is possible to be out of the sandbox and have trust rank and still be in this filter. The idea behind this filter is that older sites and domain names are more likely to rank well for keyword terms then newer sites. If you are in this filter you will most likely not rank well for terms that are competitive until your site grows older.

How to work around this: Quality links from authority sites with high trust rank will help you do much better in the serps.

Google’s Omitted Results Filter: Pages within your website that are in omitted search results will not show up in a Google search unless a user specifically says to show all omitted results. Usually users do not even get to the last page to do this which makes any page of yours that is omitted completely out of a Google search result. The reason this happens is lack on inbound links, duplicate content, duplicate meta title, duplicate meta description and poor internal linking.

How to get out of this: In order to get pages are omitted out of this filter simply alter the meta tags and fix duplicate content and get some quality inbound links.

Google’s Trust Rank Filter: Like the PageRank algorithm the trust rank algorithm has many factors that determine a sites trust rank. Some of the known factors are the age of a site, the amount of quality authority links pointing to it, how many outbound links it has, the quality of its inbound linking structure, internal linking structure and overall SEO best practices on meta and url structure. All sites go through this filter and if your Trust Rank is low so will your rankings in the serps.

How to get work with this: An old site and a new site can both have high trust rank or low trust rank. It is basically determined by the amount of quality authority links pointing to it, how many outbound links it has, the quality of its inbound linking structure, internal linking structure and overall SEO best practices on meta and url structure. Optimize these and you will have quality Trust rank.

links.htm page filter: This filter penalizes a sites ranking determined by the use of a links.html page. Using reciprocal linking is a old technique that is not promoted by Google anymore. This filter effects your ranking in the serps.

How to work with this filter: Instead of using “links” as your page title and name try using something like “mynewbuddies” or “coolsites” as this will help get around this filter. Reciprocal links are old seo techniques and Google devalues reciprocal linking structures.Here is someone discussing this at SEOChat.

Reciprocal Link Filter: Google is very open about reciprocal linking and clearly states that their algorithm can detect reciprocal link campaigns. Usually sites that only participate in reciprocal linking will have a hard time ranking in the search engines but depending on what you are using your site for a reciprocal links campaign might be exactly what you need. For example if you are building an adsense site then you do not want to spend to much time building a site up and a reciprocal linking campaign will help your sites inbound links grow over time.

How to work with this filter: When it comes to building an inbound linking structure try to utilize some or all of the 15 types of links and how to get them post I did a ways back. Here are some resources about this filter. Matt Cutts here and here, Search engine guide and Webmasterworld.

Link Farming Filter: Link farms are sites/pages that have a mass amount of unrelated links grouped together arbitrarily. Link farms can also be related links but most commonly they are unrelated. IP farms and bad link neighborhoods are all part of link farming. Being a part of a link farm can get your rankings dropped in Google and possibly get you banned.

How to get around this: Currently the only way to get around this is to NOT participate in link farming. Here are some resources on link farming:

CO-citation Linking Filter: This popular filter by Google watches your inbound link structure. If your link is on a site who’s outbound links are related to casino’s and porn sites and your automotive site is an outbound link on this site then google will think your site is related to porn and casinos. Poorly constructed co-citation will damage your ranking and make it hard for you to rank well for the terms you are targeting.

How to work with this: When considering a link partner, paid link or monitoring your inbound links be sure to follow this linking quaility guidline page that was derived from Patrick Gavin over at text link ads.

To many links at once Filter: This filter is applied when to many inbound links are acquired by a site to fast. The result can lead to a ban across all search engines. How these links are obtained, how many and over what period of time are factors for this filter.

How to get around this: Simply do not participate in black hat linking schemes and link spaming and you should never have a problem with this. Here is some information concerning this filter over at Aaron Walls at SEObook.com,

To many Pages at once filter: Google is keen on natural site development. Anything that look “unnatural” is going to be flaged by the search engines. Having to many pages to fast will raise this flag/filter. Some people believe that 5000 is the max for pages in a month but this number in my opinion can fluctuate depending on other factors and filters your site might be going through at any given time. The effect of this filter can result in pages being omitted, pages in supplemental results and in the extreme case a Google ban.

How to get through this filter: If you have a system that pulls content in or are using a dynamic content generator be sure to limit it per week and I would stay under 5000 pages per month just to be on the safe side. Depending on how large or well known your site is then the limit will be adjusted.

Broken Link Filter: Broken internal links can cause pages from not being crawled, cached and indexed. If pages like your home page do not have a link back to it on all pages this can count against you in the serps and your overall quality score for things like PR. This is not just bad seo and bad site design but this is bad for your users and can cause poor traffic and poor serp ranking.

How to get through this: Make sure you have a quality footer, a sitemap that covers all of your pages in one central hub and make sure you test your site for broken links. (be sure to use full url’s in your linking via source code).

Page Load Time Filter: The page load filter is very simple. If your website takes to long to load then a spider will time out and move past your site or page. This will result in NEVER being cached and indexed. Ultimately this means your site or page will not be present in Googles SERPS.

How to work with this: Make sure your pages are optimized for load time. Make sure if you are using flash or many images you use java pre-load coding. Make sure you limit the file size of your page’s as much as possible to make sure the spiders can read the entire document and be sure to use web 2.0 and css best practices.

Over Optimization Filter: Over optimization can cause a Google ban or hardship in rankings. Over optimization could be considered keyword stuffing, to much keyword density and keyword proximity optimization, meta tag stuffing etc. Stay away from over optimization.

How to get around this: Don’t over optimize!!!!

There are some filter’s I have not mentioned but I thought I would give a smaller list of other filters that could be attributed to Google:

Keyword Stuffing Filter:
Meta Tag Stuffing Filter:
Automated Google Query Filter:
IP Class Filter:
Google Toolbar Filter:
Click through Filter in serps:
Traffic Filter:
Google -950 Filter:
I would like to hear what other SEO professionals have to say about my list as I have seen a lot of these and I have heard other’s speak of these and since Google has not come out and told all of use which filters exists and do not exists please consider this an excersize of knowledge expansion for all ;-).

P.S. Mark Blair put together a very nice printable pdf file version of this post for your downloadable and printable pleasure ;-). Thanks Mark!

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15 types of links and how to get them

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I was currently thinking of how to setup an appropriate linking structure for a site I was working on. I had to sit down and really think of all the different ways and types of links I could go after and how effective they are and where to get them. So instead of just keeping this to myself I decided to post it on my blog and share it with everyone. It was a pretty quick post because it was kinda late and I’m tired but I hope this is enough.

Authority Links
How to get them: Google search, Google and Yahoo directory http://directory.google.com/ , Arelis,
what to look for: Sites that rank for top level keywords, Notability, alexa rank and age of domain name
Examples: motortrend.com, lunarpages.com,
Notes: Most likely you will be able to purchase links from these sites or you can utilize linkbait, or content bait to get them to link back to you. Authority links are an absolutly must have in order to build a websites trust rank!

Directory Links
How to get them: Aaron walls has a great list of powerful directories, Strongest directory links
what to look for: You should submit slowly to directories. About 3-5 a month per website. Keep it slow and natural. The best directories will be relevant/related content directories or niche directories.
Examples: www.real-estate-ims-directory.com or site-sift.com, dmoz.org, botw, yahoo directory etc.
Notes: Directory links are not as strong as some SEO’s might think. Keep these to a minimum and stick with relevant one way links.

Reciprocal Links
How to get them: Probably one of the easiest to get but not the most effective. You can try link metro, link market, webmaster forums and Arelis.
what to look for: Its always hard trying to negotiate a reciprocal link that will be in your favor but the majority of link exchanges will be pretty equal to what you are offering yourself. Make sure the page is cached, indexed and no black hat techniques are being used.
Examples: Link market, link metro.
Notes: Reciprocal links are out dated and old seo technology. They can serve a purpose though. Lets say you just need a few links to start getting your site crawled then reciprocals are great. Maybe you have a black hat campaign then reciprocal links could work well.

SiteWide Links
How to get them: Usually you can purchase these through sites like textlinkbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com. Asking around in forums like digital point and sitepoint are great ways to do this as well.
what to look for: You are going to want to find sites that have a large number of indexed pages with quality content, relevant and have PR.
Notes: Site wide links are not something you want or need a lot of. If a few sites out of hundreds do this for you then you are looking at a good inbound linking structure. To many sitewide links will raise a red flag with google and could penelize you in the serps. Usually having to many inbound links from one IP and domain can hurt you so make sure you do not go over board with these types of links but they absolutly have there place and google does like these in regards to PR.

One way links
How to get them: Contextual advertising, forums,
what to look for: Look for relevant sites that have a low amount of outbound links with decent rankings. Stay away from area’s that say “sponsored links, friends, advertisements”. The higher on the page you are placed the better.
Notes: One way links are going to be one of the more effective ways to gain rankings in the SERP’s. Many quality sites have MORE one way links then any other type of links because of link bait and quality content.
Examples: Blogrolls

3-way Links
How to get them: three-way-links.com, forums, arelis
what to look for: You will always want relevant links with quality content but 3-way links can be considered a little grey hat so be careful on how many you do. Depending on the type of site you have you may want more or less or none of these.
Examples: site 1 links to site b and site b links to site c
Notes: Considered more of a grey hat technique so use with caution.

4-way links (coined by joe whyte)
How to get them: forums, arelis
what to look for: a new way to fool the search engines but you need enough sites to do this. Its the same idea as a 3 way link but 2 out of the 4 sites are getting a one way and the other to are giving a link. Stay with relevant sites with quality content.
Examples: Site 1 links to site 2 and site 3 links to site 4
Notes: This is a good idea for people who are used to reciprocal linking. If a webmaster has more then one site then they can start building there one way links much more effectively instead of doing reciprocals.

.Edu and .Gov Links
How to get them: Use yahoo query inurl:.edu or .gov search query, Arelis.
what to look for: There are a ton of ways to get these. Look for resource .edu libraries, email students directly who have a webspace through there educational institution and offer them something in return for there webspace or a link on there webspace.
Notes: TLD’s like .edu’s and .gov’s are not neccesarily BETTER then a .com but usually have much more trust rank as they have been around a lot longer and they have quality content which is updated frequently. Basically the trust rank on these sites is very high and will help your sites tremendously.

Radio station, Television, Magazine or Newspaper links
How to get them: Usually contextual advertising.
what to look for: duh look for radio, television, magazine or newspaper links duh!
Examples: http://www.50states.com/news/, http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/ etc
Notes: These are most likely not going to be relevant to your sites content but usually these site have good trust rank, are trafficked heavily and are good resource links for your site.

Press Release Links
How to get them: Search for press release submission services and or sites that allow press releases which are normally your newspaper sites.. HINT HINT.
what to look for: Look for industry leaders and stay away from the mom and pop press release sites.
Examples: PR.com and PRWeb.com are some great press release sites
Notes: Press releases are usually not a GREAT way to get inbound links but can be a good source of traffic and any little bit helps when building a white hat inbound link campaign.

Article Bio Links
How to get them: Creating an article and then syndicating it amoung hundreds of article submission sites.
what to look for: Look for any sites that are article syndication sites.
Examples: Ezine.com, articledashboard.com, etc.
Tools: If you can you might want to pick up a article syndication spammer. I use them and it works pretty well. This is a faster way to submit an article to many sites which is not black hat related unless you go to fast and to many.
Notes: Article syndication has not really improved a large sites rankings dramatically but works pretty well for lower competitive keywords. The more sites that have content pointing back to you or refrencing your site will overall increase how many pages are indexed for a given term. In my experience I have seen rankings for lower competitive terms when doing article syndication. Works great for SEV (search engine vanity).

RSS/Blog syndicated links
How to get them: This is so easy. Start a blog and put some quality content up and most importantly offer RSS, Atom or xml so your reader’s can syndicate your feed.
What to look for: Look for blog directories, blog syndication sites etc
Tools: http://www.sphere.com/, feedburner.com, technorati,
Notes: Highly debated in the industry but syndication can help in many ways in my opinion. From traffic to inbound links and branding. Syndication is syndication in my opinion and from my experience blog syndication works well.

Comments and Profile Links
How to get them: Find related popular blogs and comment on them and provide a link back to your site.
what to look for: popular blogs in your industry that allow tags
Notes: Since most blogs utilize a rel=nofollow tag these are not going to count towrads your seo efforts as mush as you would hope but they still show up in your backlinks and can help increase branding, traffic and could help in crawling, indexing and ranking.

Presell Page Links
How to get them: Presall pages are pretty hard to find. You can do google searches, arelis, forums and webmasters
what to look for: You want to find a reputable site that is a quality relevant site with high PR and traffic.
Notes:If you just contact webmasters and ask to purchase a full page on there site they will give you a price if you provide the content. Usually this is something that can be done with ease but you might have to do some digging. These type’s of links are great for seo as the whole page is going to be content you provide which will be relevant content and inbound links.

Social Media Links
How to get them: Submit to them, search for them, create accounts and pimp them OUUUUT
what to look for: any sites that have to do with people getting together for a common goal
Examples: myspace, tickme.com, digg, stumbleupon
Tools:This is a great opportunity to create spam programs unless you want to go white hat then you can optimize this with tact like me
Notes:Links on social media do help. Not only is digg submissions actually ranking for results much like wikipedia does not but it also draw’s a ton of traffic to your site. Leverage social media to your favore and you seo efforts will come full circle!

Popularity: 24% [?]

Interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org and Joe Whyte | SEO Corner

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I was working on a new blog series on blog.lunarpages.com. I came up with the idea of interviewing some of the web’s most successful SEO and Internet Marketers. My first interview in the series is with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org. We talked about what a professional marketer needs to look for when considering a web hosting company. Stop in and take a look.

Lunarpages Blog

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Wiki Search taking on Google, Yahoo! and MSN?

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Author: Joe Whyte

Today I was checking out some things over at wikipedia just to keep tabs on them trying to take over the world. Well to my surprise I found a page that is requesting wiki members and developers to start creating a user defined search engine. The founder of wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) is attempting to make a search engine that fixes the “broken” search industry that is alive today. From what Jimmy is saying is that he wants PEOPLE to do what any Algorithm cannot which is probably something like Social Search. Social Search is something that Google, Yahoo and MSN have already talked about and is something that is already in development. Social Search IS the future of search but when will it be realized and will it ever be a stand alone search engine with no help from an algorithms? I think not! The time it will take for all possible search results to be customized to a user’s search behavior is a life long process so there still needs to be something that can make Social or “personalized” search move quicker and smarter.

To get a general overview on social search, see this great article over at SEroundtable.com.

Here is information about Googles Social Search.
Google’s way of utilizing social search is allowing a tracking system to follow you while you search. So if you are doing a search for cooking and you click on 2 results on the first page and 4 results on the second page then when you perform that search using “personalized search” you will have all of the results you clicked at the top of YOUR search so you dont have to digg to find them. This technique makes for a personalized Search Engine Results page FULL of results that are relevant to what you are looking for.

Here is Yahoo! Getting social: I have not seen any beta for yahoo social search YET, if someone does have a sneak peak on this please let me know. I do know that Yahoo! is starting to create a social search beta program and it seems that they definitely know the power of social search and have their eyes focused on the future of search.

Here is MSN getting social: With MSN I have not found an actual beta test for their Personalized or social search engine. MSN see’s the power in social search so they are too gearing up to create a social search engine utilizing the power of the end user.

With the links above you can see the emphasis put on social search amongs all of the major search engines. Its clear that social search is going to be the future of search as it can provide much more accurate results. Social Search is definitely a much more exact way to search for the INDIVIDUAL but there are still a ton of variables that need to be considered to make this successful. Google’s current “personalized search” is a good start but still very flawed as it sends a bot to track my current movement in the serps. For a user to completely rely on Googles personalized search this BOT would need to know what the user would PROBABLY click on for any given search term. The problem with personalized search is that it will only pull relevant results on search terms you have ALREADY searched for. In conclusion, WIKIpedia’s jimmy wales is not creating something that HAS not been thought of before he is just doing it wiki style ;-).

2006 was a big year for social search and I predict that social search will continue to be a large topic in 2007.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Joe Whyte Mentioned on Web Pro News!

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I was doing some SEV (search engine vanity) today and I noticed that Joe Lewis from Web Pro News decided to do an interesting post about a topic that has been widely discussed in 2006 which is Google’s Supplemental Results. I recently did a post over at lunarpages about “Google Poo” and during my SEV I found a post on Web Pro News quoting me. Needless to say I was flattered and Joe Lewis wrote a great article about Google supplemental results and I recomend everyone checking out his article. I am going to have to put you in my news reader JOE!

Merry Christmas!!!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Pre-production SEO and Googles Crawl Cycle

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When attempting to launch a site it is always a good plan to come out of the gates fast. Launching a site at the right time can mean the difference between monetizing your site now or in a couple months. To many SEO’s and Webmaster’s this might not even be an issue but for an SEO professional who has time constraints and deadlines these are must have tools. Out of the majority of major search engines Google is one of the fastest for inclusion. As expected, there are risk’s and potential concerns that we need to face regarding pre-production. Below I will be addressing how to catch the googlebot, how the Google cycle works and what this means to you.

Google “dance” cycle:

The Google update cycle is more then simple termonlogy regarding the update and shift Googles Serps go through during periodical updates but most recently google has incorporated a “Google Dance” at their conventions quite literally. Over the last few years pin pointing this dance has turned out to be more of a shot in the dark then an educated guess which is due to many algorithm updates.

The process of the google crawl is as follows:
Crawl one: Google sends out spiders or (Googlebot) out to spider the sites in its current database and to spider new websites. Sometime around 2 weeks Google will show these new results within a secondary and third level serp at www2.google.com and www3.google.com. User’s of Google will most likely see shifting in results as sometimes Google moves results from its second and third database to its primary database. Another problem I have encountered is that results can be different depending on what Google server your results are being pulled from again allowing many variations of potential search results until the smoke clears.

Crawl two: Once the new results are being shifted in the Google serps googlebot will again be sent out to start crawling new sites along with the current sites within its own index. This process continues and has been the case ever since Google has been around.
Note: It is important to watch the your PR update list as well to help you gage when Google’s PR updates are coming along with the cycling.

How to catch the Googlebot:

From what experts and user’s have found is that there is an update usually at the beginning of the month and then immediately during and after the first crawl so you will want to do your pre-production accordingly.

If you are looking to have a new site included into a certain months update then will either of these crawls get you into the database? Studies show that putting your site up at the beginning of the month might possibly NOT bring your site into the index within that months update. If your new site is crawled in the second phase then you could have a better chance of seeing your site in the revised results following the next month’s first crawl. In other circumstances you will see that Googlebot only grabs your homepage and your robots.txt which is a good indicator that your site will be revisited in the next update.

Here are some helpful tips: If your site is crawled after the first crawl then you are looking at most likely having your site included in the next update which should show new rankings within a month or a month and a half. Now to plan for the exact moment to launch your site and get a few inbound links would be best planed out rather then a random guess. You can do this by watching some of your other sites crawl and update patterns and time it accordingly. This should give you the key to increasing your update schedule for your new sites.

There is no 100% sure fire way to pinpoint these updates but you can use these steps and tools to help you make the best of your efforts.

-Obtain links from relevant sites with decent PR
-Submit your site to the add url page on google and other search engines
-Install the Google toolbar and visit your own site using the toolbar

How does this relate to your SEO Campaign

The information provided to SEO professionals can undoubtedly help with any pre production site launch and SEO campaign planning. This information can help with a tight production schedule and monetizing your site as quickly as possible.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Phony SEO companies boasting sensational claims

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It’s well known that the Search Engine Optimization industry has a dark side. The dark side of course being the companies who boast sensational claims that give us true SEO organization’s a bad name. These companies try to sell services that are unfounded or have little to know true effect on search ranking. To many search engine marketing experts we can identify these pretty easily but to the average webmaster these sensational claims could lead them down the wrong path.

When searching for “internet marketing”, “SEO” or “boost traffic” you will come across advertisements that might say something like “10,000 unique visitors for only 12.99” or “Guaranteed top 3 ranking for $50 a month”.  As a search engine marketer there are many things in these statements that help’s me identify a phony SEO company. Firstly, the amount of traffic promised for only 12.99. Driving traffic is a very dynamic process which involves creating link bait, creating content, purchasing ad space, utilizing PPC and email and print campaigns. As you might expect all of these steps take time, development and research to build proper, targeted and long term traffic.  Another red flag in these ads is the word guaranteed. No legitimate SEO or SEM will make such a boast as there is truly no guarantee that what we do will land someone’s site in a certain position. What ethical SEO’s will tell you is that we can improve your rankings but no guarantee will be given as we do not control the search engines we “optimize” you for them.

Submission’s to search engines is a way to let the search engines know about a new site but once you are submitted ONCE you do NOT need to be resubmitted. Many phony SEO companies will claim to submit you to over 40,000 search engines for a low price per month. This is a HUGE red flag because there are simply not 40,000 search engines on the net. These outrageous claims  are usually justified by these companies using automated submission software which normally do more harm then good.

Here is a top 10 list of what to look for when considering an seo or sem company:

1.    How long has this company been around?
2.    Do they list their clientele or show results?
3.    Can you find reviews or information about the seo company?
4.    Do they have a phone number or live person to speak with?
5.    Are they sensationalizing results or guaranteeing anything?
6.    Do they have a trust worthy site design or does it look  low budget?
7.    See what the industry is saying about them
8.    Call them and ask them some questions to test their knowledge
9.    Ask for a free site evaluation and compare that with other companies cliam
10.    Doe’s the company itself have ranking and PR

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google’s fox speaks with rand from seomoz about google sitemaps

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Popularity: 3% [?]