Why Automated SEO Services “Still” Suck

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jul 26, 2007

Another one of my clients got pitched again…

“We will submit your web site and its related keyword to 800000 search engines once per month for 1 year. You can expect to start seeing results within 60 days. Your web site will climb up that ladder of other web sites on various search engines.”

All for $199 they claim.

Sounds too good to be true? It is, don’t worry! Here’s what the seo services companies know you don’t know if this offer is intriguing to you:

1) As a general rule, I am against pay-per-month, automated search engine submission systems. Search engines are too. If you submit your site every month to google, it will only be a matter of months before your site is blacklisted for spamming google.

2) There are only 40 or so main databases that all search engines draw from so when someone (and I hear this a lot) claims that your site will be submitted to 80,000 search engines, red flags go up in my mind.

3) No one will get you better search positioning unless someone (you or them) gets into your website to make changes to the pieces that matter to the search engines. The question to ask them is “who” will study the makeup of every page of your site and spend the time to make those changes.

With that said, I know that technology is ever changing and eventually there will be some sort of magic bullet for this. So, I would advise that if you choose to go that route, and just can’t stand the idea of paying more than a couple hundred bucks for someone to do the job right for you, that you create another web site or mini-site about something related to your topic and give it to them to do their magic with.

If that site can go for 6 months on its own at the top of the search engines like they claim, without getting blacklisted by google, then you might consider getting them involved with your bread & butter site. But, I would never use an automated submission tool or service with a main site until it was proven with another site that doesn’t matter.

New Unavailable_After Meta Tag for Google

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jul 25, 2007

I learned from a blog post that Google is now accepting a new meta tage called unavailable-after. This new function will essentially list a page of your website until a certain date and then delete it from its index after that date. Perfect if you have a special offer on your site that someone must buy before a specific date. Also good if you are holding workshop registrations online and don’t want to feature the event after a certain date.

But what intrigued me about this particular addition is that meta tags are pretty much bottom of the totem pole when it comes to assisting with positioning your website in the serps. Google is now resorting once again to meta tags. Could this be a reversal in time where it was once meta tags that ruled the earth?

Internet Safety Makes News

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jul 24, 2007

What do MySpace, Miss America and Seatbelts have in common? They all promote safety. Yahoo! News reports that MySpace has identified and deleted 29,000 sex offenders’ listings from their system. Congrats to MySpace for taking this long awaited action. Bet that sex offender sting on that television show brought some motivation their way.

And then there’s Miss America who even got into it with congress today! Awe, how sweet that she’s begging congress to require education of children to protect themselves from online predators.

I’m happy for MySpace and MA for their contributions. But, who will bring awareness to the masses about the dozens of ways we are at risk by using the Internet on a daily basis? There are so many ways that so many people have no idea that the damage is being done. And it’s happening right under their (and my) nose.

iPhone Hackers are More Dangerous than Just Spam

Posted by Marty Dickinson on Jul 23, 2007

Today I heard that hackers hacked into the iPhone through an Internet connection and all I heard about was the potential threat of a malicious hacker sending thousands of spam messages to the phone. This would of course cost the iPhone user a wee bit of change to take all of those spam calls and text messages.

But it seems to me the bigger threat was not mentioned at all. And, that would be if a hacker got into an iPhone and had their phone ring at the same time the actual recipient’s phone rang. Imagine not even knowing that a hacker has hacked into your iPhone and every call you make gets listened in on.

Be careful what you listen to…it might only be the tip of the iceberg.