Montreal SEO & Internet Marketing Blog

Ye Olde Search Engine Submission Scam

My favorite Caribbean restaurant’s website can be hard to find, even when searching for it by name and city together. I first discovered their site last year by looking at their take-out menu after ordering a delicious meal.

When I visit a site that holds some interest for me – and it lacks basic functionality such as an html title, I’ll often look at the bottom of the page for a link to the site’s creator. If it’s a web company, I’ll take a look at the services they offer.

I followed the link I found to a small web design outfit that advertises “Search engine submission” at the bottom of their services page.

Submitting your website to the search engines is the first step to getting found and increasing your website traffic!

If you want people searching on Google, Yahoo! or MSN to find your website – the first step is Search Engine Submission. Search engine submission is the process of getting your website included in the various search engines’ databases. If you’re not listed – there’s little chance of being found!

Don’t wait for valuable exposure – Get Listed Today!

We submit your site to all the major search engines every month for $20 per month. We also Guarantee 7 day listing in Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

$240+tax

Let’s just break this down, shall we.

Submitting your website to the search engines is the first step to getting found and increasing your website traffic!

Opening a text editor (or in this company’s case, Frontpage?) is also a first step to getting found and increasing web traffic . Do you charge a couple of hundred dollars to open the text editor as well? Do you charge $200 to close your html tags as well? </sarcasm> <- This one is free.

Also free: submitting to Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN).

If you want people searching on Google, Yahoo! or MSN to find your website – the first step is Search Engine Submission.

You just said that. Overcompensate much?

Search engine submission is the process of getting your website included in the various search engines’ databases.

Wrong. Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website to the search engines. But whatever.

If you’re not listed – there’s little chance of being found!

Nice way to manipulate the perception of what’s needed to achieve search visibility.

Of course if a site isn’t “listed”, there’s no chance of being found in search. If you aren’t listed, you aren’t listed. Thanks for that insight. But what do listings have to do with search engine submission?

Try: There’s little chance of being found if you aren’t showing up for search terms relevant to your site.

Don’t wait for valuable exposure – Get Listed Today!

Okay, now they’re leaning into their scam a bit harder. Exposure. What they’re saying is: submission implies listings, and listings imply exposure. Therefore, if you want search engine exposure, all you need to do is submit? Smooth.

We submit your site to all the major search engines every month for $20 per month.

Say what? So not only are you charging $240 to knock on Google’s door to tell them you exist (and maybe Yahoo and Bing), but you’re going tell them every month? While you’re at it, why don’t you open up every .jpg and .png from the site in Photoshop, re-save them exactly as they are, and re-upload them every month.

Time well spent.

These people are looking for residuals on search engine submission. I’m getting angry now.

We also Guarantee 7 day listing in Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

Does that mean listed in 7 days or for 7 days? Either way, even if this search engine submission scam was worth anything; in search, the only guarantee is that there are no guarantees.

I cringe at the thought of anyone paying for this type of bogus service.

Talking about its indexing process, Google says:

We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it’s likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form.

Search engine submission scams aren’t as widespread as they were a few years ago; others have taken their place and are regularly used to prey upon naive site owners.

It isn’t my intention to create FUD. If you’re looking for a competent SEO company, ask for references, examples of past work, and educate yourself on at least the basics of web visibility before jumping into bed with any company.

Thanks to Rishil Lakhani for inspiring this piece.

Rishil, I almost linked to your site with search engine submission scams. How ironic would that have been.

Tags: Bing, Google, search engine submission, seo scams

5 Ways SEOMoz’s Newest Backlink Tool Could Improve

SEOMoz is currently allowing free, full access reports from their brand spanking new Open Site Explorer link popularity checker. The online tool has a sleek, intuitive design, and has the potential to pull in many new SEOmoz PRO Memberships, including mine. I highly recommend that you check out the full version for the remaining 24 hours of the free access preview.

One of the first places I headed to look for a review of the tool – before actually looking at it in depth – was SEO Book. Expecting the worst, I was pleasantly surprised to see Aaron Wall cast aside political industry differences, and give the tool a thumbs up. It’s nice to see search resource leaders on the same page sometimes.

I won’t go into all the features of the tool (I urge you to check them out for yourself), but I will cover a few points I’d humbly like to see addressed or improved upon sometime in the future.

1. On the ‘Linking Pages’ Tab, the title URL of external links are displayed, along with referring page anchor text, page authority, and domain authority.

   • The first search filter gives you the option to filter followed, no-followed and/or 301 redirected links – this is great.

   • The second filter allows you to view links from internal and/or external pages – also great.

   • The third filter allows you to view links to either the page you specify, or ‘all pages on the subdomain’, or ‘all pages on the root domain’.

     

     What I believe is missing here is the ability to view which of the individual pages on the domain are receiving links, should you choose to filter results by ‘all pages on the root (or sub) domain.

2. When results are given on a domain, they’re displayed at the top of the page in the following format:

   Page Authority [x] – Domain Authority [x] – Linking Root Domains [x] – Total Links [x]
   

   However, when you filter the results according to your preferences, the new data correlating to those filtered results isn’t displayed at the top of the page; therefore to see the number of results of your filtered data set, you must go to the last page of results to find out. At the very least, it would be a good idea to update the number of ‘Total Links’ on filtered results.



3. Numbered results would earn another point for usability.

4. When looking at the tab for ‘Full List of Link Metrics’, in the ‘Domain-Level Metrics’ column, ‘Total links’ s defined as:

   All links including internal, external, followed and no-followed to any page on the given website. Two or more links from the same URL to a single page are treated as one link.

   I’d like the option to view these actual links, as bloated and redundant as a lot of this data can be.

5. The ‘Linking Domains’ doesn’t give as much information as it could, but SEOMoz has addressed that already – we’ll see some more data in this section in the coming months.

SEOMoz wisely chose to wait until after the 48 hour free-for-all preview to enable .csv export. You’ll have to go Pro for that.

You have 23 hours and 20 minutes left to data scrape and test the full version of this exciting new tool to your heart’s content – for free.

Tags: Keyword Tool, SEOMoz

PCMag: SEO is killing the Internet.

According to pcmag.com’s John C. Dvorak, SEO is killing the internet.

Is this guy for real?

Or is John pcmag.com’s answer to Andy Rooney: (Whiny voice:) “Have you ever noticed how SEO is killing the Internet?”.

We all know that controversy is a great way to attract readership, but come on, didn’t you already squeeze all the ranty goodness out of SEO in February?

I’m think I’m embarrassed for John Dvorak more than I am disturbed by his ignorance.

Using John’s logic, and after reading his poorly written and badly researched article in pcmag.com, we could surmise that ‘blogging is killing the Internet’, but that would obviously be a ridiculous assumption. The medium isn’t what kills – it’s the careless misinformation transmitted through the medium. That’s the death of a thousand cuts.

The SEO Industry is saturated with snake oil SEO salesmen that are desperately trying to jump on the industry’s bandwagon for one very good reason; there is real value in real SEO – value to site owners, and value to the Internet as a whole. Professional search engine optimization involves a holistic approach to search visibility that encompasses Web usability, accessibility, and Web standards to support compelling content – not unethical trickery.

Are there countless blackhat search engine optimization methods being used to push sites up in the rankings? You betcha. Is the Internet saturated with spammy sites that push Viagra, Acai berry, Shamwows, and instant riches at every turn? I think we know the answer to that one. Does this imply that all reputed SEO firms reach into a bag of spam and cloaking to get their clients on the first page of the search engine results pages? Negative on that Houston.

Most of the time, blackhat SEO is used on throwaway domains, designed for fast money, and then ditched in favor of the next project. This has little to do with SEO formulated for long-term web presence. Is mechanical engineering crap as well because there are so many rip-off mechanics?

Don’t bite the tag that feeds you

Looking at the source code of the page that this ridiculous post is on (as well as other areas of the site), it’s evident that pcmag.com has attempted to implement measures that ensure some level of search visibility themselves. Does John C. Dvorak object to pcmag.com’s efforts of getting his oh-so-important opinion properly indexed on the Internet?

In February 2009 on pcmag.com Dvorak wrote another uninformed SEO rant: SEO Fiascoes: The Trouble with Search Engine Optimization. What he was struggling to explain (unsuccessfully) was that the keyword meta tag is useless because of its history of keyword spam targeting:

“…Tags, stored as such, are the modern equivalent of the metatags once used on crude HTML pages. They don’t work and are a stupid exercise in futility…since the search engines all stopped looking at metatags—and that was the end of that until tags reappeared, for some reason…”

The fact that John refers to the keyword meta tag as “metatags” is another dead giveaway (of many) that he couldn’t possibly have spent less time researching for this sloppy example of journalism at it’s worst. It’s almost comforting to read a couple of his other views on:

• Open sourced software: …I’m not sure where this is all headed, but it’s kind of like the Open Source movement. It relies on a large and vague group of mavens…
• Semantic Web: …this one promoted by the “social media is everything” crowd in alliance with the “semantic Web is the future” dingbats…

Here’s a revealing quote:

…I’ve complained about it before but it’s too late to do anything about it except moan more…

Know thyself, John.

Tags: Accessibility, Social Media, Web Standards

Accepting SEO’s Social Dimension

Many SEOs have coding (opposed to marketing) backgrounds, and enjoy hours on end of alone-time in front of the computer. The stereotypical B movie computer nerd, glued to the monitor in mom’s basement and surrounded by Coke cans isn’t typically known for his social skills.

Not that B movie stereotypes dominate our industry, but I think you see what I’m getting at.

The ass-kissing, social climbing, or mutual m*sturbating nature of “link building” can be a real turn off to someone attracted to the more technical aspects of search. But the harsh reality is that building an online business is in many ways similar to running a brick and mortar operation; you need to develop professional relationships beyond your clientele if you want to succeed with your online ventures.

With some social skills (or at least interaction), your chances of discovering mutually beneficial opportunities and partnerships increase exponentially.

I’ll admit that I’d like to see Google put less value on incoming links. If unethical schemes for exaggerating a site’s worth were reserved to on-site tactics, some of us wouldn’t feel so bitter about the indexing advantages acquired by those willing to chance paying for links.

With all cards closer to – if not on – the table, quality content and site architecture would take on even greater importance in establishing a visible web presence.

But I digress.

For the time being, the right types of links matter – a lot. So let’s accept it. For now.

Visualize your Web site as a shop that you opened on the edge of town. If enough reliable tenants were to vouch for you, the landlord would probably trust you enough to rent you a choice spot, closer to the center of town.

With some connections and networking, chances are you’ll find a more visible section of online real estate from which to run your business; especially if you continue to nourish your inner geek’s appetite for the more technical SEO skillsets.

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Tags: Bing, Google, links, Social Media