10 replies to this topic

[BizMord]

We had people come in from a pretty popular SEM company .... you know them for sure. Here are things they mentioned.

1. With Yahoo and Google you can do Paid Inclusion and get higher ranking. We can get you in top 10 quickly.

2. Our engineers know what Google will do with their algorithm in the future.

3. Google Site Maps is a great thing to get better results in rankings.

Guys and ladies ... please tell me your opinion on this??? Do they deserve a boot in their A**?

I am particularly interested in their "Paid Inclusion" suggestion.

[joedolson]

Sounds like pretty generic SEO bull. None of that is true to the best of my knowledge.

1. Yahoo and Google do paid inclusion.

Google does not and has never allowed paid inclusion. here,here or especially here.

Yahoo! does offer a paid inclusion program, but it does not provide higher rankings, it merely insures prompt indexing for new sites and provides additional tools including more frequent refreshing of content and reports.

2. Our engineers know what Google will do with their algorithm in the future.

I can't disprove this; for all I know that company has a mole in Google leaking all that juicy news which they keep secret for themselves so that they can profit off the knowledge. Or maybe they have a crystal ball. Either way, I doubt it.

3. Google Site Maps is a great thing to get better results in rankings.

Google Sitemaps has no effect on your site rankings except in that it offers the possibility that Google will find pages which they would not otherwise have found on your site, and you will thus rank for those pages. However, it is unlikely those pages have any great ranking value, since they are otherwise unlinked. (Why else would Google be unable to find them?)

What Google Sitemaps does offer is access to a lot of data which Google has about your site - including what pages you've blocked using robots.txt, an approximation of the search terms which your site comes up for most frequently and which are selected, pages which they encountered problems with and couldn't index, and much more. Using this information, you can modify your pages to make a significant impact on the ranking of your pages.

Boot 'em.

[yannis]

When it comes to money and sex anything is possible...but be careful with what you do with them. It is certainly advantageous to pay for a listing in the Yahoo directory. Google does not have a paid submission service but you can buy advertizing for your company to show on the top of results as sponsored links. I for one never click on them. A lot of money can also go down the drain very quickly if you use this type of advertizing.

Our engineers know what Google will do with their algorithm in the future.

I very much doubt it. Google's algorithm is an evolving algorithm.

Sitemaps will ensure better crawling by Google.

Certainly a good SEO Company can help, but like buying any other management services, identify your goals and do enough background reading on the subject. These forums are a good starting point

[bragadocchio]

Hi BizMord,

It sounds like you approached your meeting with them with some healthy skepticism.

I don't know if you would want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and call them on these claims. I don't know if I would. I don't know if they were trying to give you the 30 second elevator speech, or if they sent someone to a meeting who wasn't well versed in what they do, or if they were trying to persuade without getting into technical details, or what. But, you are probably right to be skeptical of those claims.

It's a good thing that I looked at Joe's response while previewing the first half of mine. He's covered the three items you've mentioned very well, so I'm not going to duplicate that effort.

[randfish]

I sincerely hope this wasn't from some of the big SEO firms in our industry that have reputations to uphold (Razorfish, WebSourced, iProspect, Bruce Clay, etc.), but I have heard other similiar stories.

If you're feeling particularly muckrakerish (not sure about that adjective, but it fits), you could post their entire list of services and what they wanted to charge (assuming they didn't make it legally confidential). I've examined many proposals of this nature and always get a kick out of it (whether it's valid or not).

In any case, as Bill said, it was certainly wise of you to approach their proposals with skepticism - you've saved your company a lot of heartache.

[BizMord]

Hi Rand,

This company is not in the list you had, BUT they are a company you see on all the shows, all them time and they are very big. Anyway ... I don't want to play the guessing game. The bottom line is that the company is big, known, and they are everywhere.

I appreciate your comments. Thank you to all who contributed.

[Black_Knight]

Yahoo! does offer a paid inclusion program, but it does not provide higher rankings, it merely insures prompt indexing for new sites and provides additional tools including more frequent refreshing of content and reports

Actually, Yahoo's Paid Inclusion is far more complex. It's nothing to do with the directory submission. Paid Inclusion allows you to supply a special feed to Yahoo. The feed gets indexed and ranked for the 'on page' criteria, not the actual page. Its been described as 'sanctioned cloaking' in the past, and that's not too far off of fair.

[A.N.Onym]

Let me be a devil's advocate just once.

1. With Yahoo and Google you can do Paid Inclusion and get higher ranking. We can get you in top 10 quickly.

Could they have meant that you pay for submission to a host of directories and get higher rankings in Google and Yahoo? If that's so, it surely is possible. However, if that's the case, it is not clear why the left out MSN out of there. Bill Gates fan?

Did they mean "top 10 for non-competitive 3-5 keyword phrases"? If that's the case, it is really easy to do.

Yet, "top 10 quickly" is just not exactly what I'd expect from a SEO. Targeted visitors, maybe?

2. Our engineers know what Google will do with their algorithm in the future.

Of course noone outside Google knows or should know how exactly the algorithm will behave in the future. Will it give a lot or medium weight to inbound relevant links? This is beyond anyone's knowledge, except for Google engineers.

However, what we know is that Google is trying to give weight to natural quality and downrate artificial (spam, keyword stuffing, link exchanges, scraping) quality. With this in mind, we can safely assume that the we know that Google will never downrate a great site, which developed great content and natural linking over time - or if it will, it'll be a mistake in an algorithm, which should or will be fixed. In this case, we can say that we know how Google algorithm will look like in the future - it will resemble natural site development to provide exceptional value to its visitors. Also we can predict right now what we need to do to a site to live a long and great life - mainly by getting a lot of relevant, unique, quality content and some publicity.

So there, from this perspective, the phrase above looks absolutely legitimate to me. However, anyone can know that, not only engineers.

3. Google Site Maps is a great thing to get better results in rankings.

Well, here they flopped.

Unless they meant that faster indexing of fresh pages will give a 'fresh page boost' to every of your pages, as Google Sitemaps (as has already been said) only help getting indexed.

However, the effect of Google Sitemaps is barely noticeable, because inbound links are weighed far more than Google Sitemaps. If you have 1-3k incoming links, you are indexed every 10-30 minutes. That should be enough to ditch Google maps (unless you want to be up-to-date with the technology and need Google Sitemaps statistics).

Also, as been suggested, perhaps you talked with a sales person, who didn't know much about what the company actually does and how exactly it does it. Maybe he/she decided to stick some vague benefits instead of clearly labeled quality SEO? Try talking to their engineers and see what they respond, if you want/need/prefer to deal with the company.

Enjoy

Edited by A.N.Onym, 26 May 2006 - 09:17 PM.

[projectphp]

Google also has a similar scheme. I can't remember the name, they didn't promote it widely and the "inclusion" was into the Adwords chunk, but it was called something like content to AdWords. Basically, it took content, and showed an ad where the content matched (in teh AdWords section). I never got, personally, how an uncontrollable system like that could be better than a controllable one like AdWords, but, like, WHATEVER!

Yahoo PI's greatest effectiveness is for chasing the tale with "deep" frequuently changing content. imagine feeding in job listings and refreshing them every 48 hours. That is about the only way many would get into the index, and the only real way to maintain timeliness of such content, as most job listings don't last very long at all.

[Black_Knight]

Yahoo PI's greatest effectiveness is for chasing the tale with "deep" frequuently changing content

Actually, I often believe that the fact you get similar data to that of other advertising (as in impressions and CTR) is one of the biggest benefits. No more estimating volumes of searches for a phrase on a PPC tool and then trying to work out a CTR from there.

[Spencer Hoyt]

I've had prospects tell me that they were made these kinds of promises before.
I think it is humorous, but every now and then you run into a gullible customer who actually believes this type of HYPE.