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Screwed: Is this an Inevitability in the SEO World?

 [SitePro News 5-25-05]

By Courtney Heard

 By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a good handful of clients and potential clients who have been speaking with other SEO firms. This an absolutely wonderful thing to see, as in the past in our industry, not enough of our consumers were questioning what they were purchasing. It is a sign that accountability will come and the bad guys will be weeded out.

While this is a good sign, it's the cause of my having to answer the same questïons over and over. The consumers in the SEO world are being fed out and out lies by some of the people who call themselves experts in the area of Search Engine Optimization. They hear these lies and while comparing prices, contact us at Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly astonished. Below are some of the most asinine claims I hear through the grapevine.

"We Can Guarantee Your Rankings"

Don't be fooled! Ask the company what you will be ranking for, immediately! 9 times out of 10, a company that guarantees you rankings, is guaranteeing that you will rank for your own company name, which means people on Google or MSN or Yahoo! would have to know your company name before searching. How does this produce new customers and visitors to your site? Chances are, as soon as these search engines index your site, you will rank within the top ten for your company name, if not first, because it is unique. Why bother paying someone for something that is already going to happen, anyway?

Guaranteeing rankings is highly unethical. It is impossible to guarantëe rankings unless you have access to Google's database itself, and even then I'm not sure it's possible. Keep in mind, we are working with a 3rd party. A highly guarded 3rd party that doesn't, under any circumstances, reveal it's secrets. No one outside of the companies that run these search engines knows what it is exactly that makes search engines rank sites high. Especially due to the fact that these search engines and the rigorous ranking filters they use to spit out search results change almost monthly. Even a former Google employee doesn't know how to guarantëe rankings! If someone is telling you they'll guarantëe top rankings, run fast! Those are some shady, shady claims. Google themselves have said:

"No one can guarantëe a -#1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantëe rankings, or that claim a "special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is by using the page at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever." - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

An ethical SEO company will not guarantëe rankings. They will guarantëe that their methods follow search engine guidelines, and they will guarantëe customer satisfaction, but at no point in time will any SEO company with a conscience guarantëe your rankings.

"Your Site Needs to Be Continually Resubmitted to Get On and Stay On the Search Engines"

When will I see the end of this one? How old is this method now? 5 years? 10 years? We're talking about the days when Webcrawler was the biggest search engine and all computers were beige! This claim is so fully untrue, had Pinocchio uttered it, his nose would have stretched from Rome to Poughkeepsie. And the good folks at Google will once again back me up on this one:

"Submission is not necessary and does not guarantëe 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. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear." - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2

"Meta Tags Are Not Important Anymore"

Sure they aren't. If you don't want a decent ranking on MSN. The new MSN search places a lot of value on the keywords and description meta tags. Without these tags in your site's code, your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just as importantly, if your keywords and description meta tags don't use proper language, your rankings will suffer. The description tag is also what MSN uses as the visible description for a site in the search results. And of course, to prove I'm not the one blowing hot air, this is what MSN themselves say about it:

"Site descriptions are extracted from the content of your page each time MSNBot crawls your site and indexes its pages...

...the best way to affect your site description is to ensure that your web pages effectively deliver the information you want to see in search results." - Click-here to see the page this is found on. ( Site Owner Help)

"Your Web Site Has Been Sabotaged"

This one is truly unreal. I can't believe it's even been used as an excuse for why an SEO company hasn't achieved decent rankings for you. But alas, more than one SEO company has told potential clients of ours that the reason they are not ranking well, or why their search engine optimization campaign is not effective, is because someone else has been sabotaging the site. Some of the clients who have been told this are small businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet sitters. We always explain to these potential clients that the likelihood of someone even having the initial idea to sabotage a web site, the site in question would have to be a fairly large one, and the target of a lot of hatred. Why? Because sabotaging a web site's rankings takes a massive amount of time and energy. We're talking months, maybe even years of hard, hard work. Why would anyone devote months or years of their life to taking down a pet sitting site? Or a bed and breakfast?

Once again, these are some hefty claims and it is a clear sign that the company who is running your SEO campaign is unwilling to be held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.

Don't Put Up With It

The bottom line is, your search engine optimization company works for you. You are paying them. Hold them accountable as you would any other vendor. Keep reading these articles, read info at the search engines, educate yourself and if something your SEO says smells a little rotten, don't be afraid to call them on it.

Is being screwed an inevitability in the SEO world? Damn near. But thanks to the increasing interest of our consumers in self-education and their increased questioning, our industry will slowly climb out of the gutter and someday down the line, send this article into antiquity. In spite of my pride, I'd be overjoyed to see that day come.


About The Author
Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, a search engine optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney's articles are available at http://www.abalone.ca/resources/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consumer Reports: Search Engines Need A Good Mechanic

Jason L. Miller | Staff Writer | 2005-04-29

 

Editor's Note: How hard is it for you to determine the difference between paid placements and organic listings when it comes to search engine results? A study by Consumer Reports determined the average Joe Internet user has a harder time doing so.


In fact, 60% of those surveyed were not even aware of paid listings. What are your thoughts concerning the CR survey? Discuss at WebProWorld.


Allow me to state the obvious. The overabundance of information available on the Internet comes in three flavors: junk; buy me; and useful. On second thought, perhaps the "buy me" category should be listed first.

What is not so obvious is the relationship between Internet search engines and advertisers whose links are displayed, almost exclusively, at the top of the results page. In fact, according to Consumer Reports WebWatch, public disclosure of this relationship is almost nonexistent.

At least in the conventional media world, it is a simple process to decipher between programming and advertising. The news is easily distinguished from the infomercial and there is no doubt as to which is wrestling and which is an aspirin commercial, even if product placement blurs the lines just a tad. The point is, we know which is which, and our day isn't noticeably affected.

These lines, however, aren't so clearly drawn on the Internet. A simple search for "lawnmower maintenance" could be a time-eating and eye-stressing exercise, as the list of online shops and bookstores provides a glaring blue and pink backdrop of "not-what-I'm-looking-for" crap. What I am looking for, if I'm willing to gamble the time, may or may not be on pages 6 though 10.

Or maybe I'm the only who's ever said, "screw it," and decided to call somebody.

The root of what is causing you to gradually become afflicted by Internet Face (an affliction of the facial muscles whereby the eyes remain in a squinted position, the nose scrunches upward, and the corners of the mouth curve downward exposing the teeth) are little known, product placement related practices known as paid placement and paid inclusion.

With paid placement, search engines are paid to list some sites more prominently than others. Paid inclusion is the accepting of fees to be included on the list when certain key words are entered in the search browser.

A recent study, entitled "Searching for Disclosure," showed that over 60% of adult Internet users surveyed were unaware of the common practice of paid inclusion. Furthermore, once informed, they had a negative reaction to the fact.

Now common sense might tell you that it is obvious that many hits are paid for, even that it is smart business on the part of the search engine and the advertiser. The issue here is not the ethics of advertising. The issue is about knowing which is which. The issue is about the effort search engines take to let people know what's advertising and what is not.

According to the study, not only were certain search engines "not going out of their way," as Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports WebWatch put it, to make distinctions between sponsored links and non-sponsored links, but some seemed to be deliberately obfuscating their relationship with advertisers.

Jergen Wouters, conductor of the study, said, ‘it is getting harder and harder to tell sponsored links from regular links. In fact, a lot [of search engines] were going over and above to hide it."

"But wait," you say, "you're not talking about professional web surfers who had problems with search engines. You're talking about Average PC Joe who's lucky to know how to operate his email account."

Not according to Brendler,

"Even information professionals had trouble finding stuff."

The problem has troubled Brendler and Wouters to the extent that they put together three studies and three conferences to discuss the topic this year.

The second conference in the series, scheduled for June 9th in San Francisco is entitled, "Trust or Consequence: How Failure to Disclose Ad Relationships Threatens to Burst the Search Bubble."

The research goes into painstaking detail about which search engines are trustworthy and which ones are not. The goal of the research and the conference is to increase awareness about paid inclusion and to put pressure on search engines to follow WebWatch and FTC guidelines for fair advertising practices.

The goal here is not to force search engines to stop allowing paid advertising, but to make it unequivocal as to which websites paid to be on the list. Researchers found that many sites, after succumbing to label paid sites, did so in a manner that was, at least, confusing and unclear.

Here are some of the key findings about disclosure:

· Majority of Disclosure Headings Were Difficult to Spot; Eight of the 15 search engines tested labeled their paid search listings with headings that were both smaller and duller in color than the search results themselves. The use of inconspicuous fonts and colors increases the likelihood consumers may not notice disclosures and fail to grasp the true nature of their results.

· Most Hyperlinks to Disclosures Were Imperceptible; With only three exceptions (Yahoo, AOL, Lycos), all search engines tested used tiny and faint fonts, such as light gray, for hyperlinks to disclosure pages. Some of these hyperlinks blended in so well with the page that some testers missed them completely.

· Many Disclosures Were Incomprehensible; Testers found many [disclosure statements] were [unclear] and almost seemed written to discourage reading.

Since the release of the first study in November of last year, two search of the top five engines, MSN and Ask Jeeves have dropped paid inclusion.

The meta-search engines (such as DogPile), which search several search engines at once, were putting forth no effort to disclose paid inclusion.

Other chief offenders, Brendler said, were 1st Blaze and Yahoo!. Though WebWatch and the FTC have pressured them, Brendler said, "1st Blaze is not responding to anything. Yahoo! isn't either."

So where are the good guys? Which search engine seems the most trustworthy?

"Google is the model we hold up for everyone. They have never used paid inclusion," Brendler said.

Indeed, Google does appear to have clearly labeled sponsored links completely separated from search results.

And the trustworthiness of Google is reflected in usage. With an audience of 53,058,000 searching an average of 26 minutes at a time, Google is not only the top search engine, but has 10 million more users than #2 MSN, and almost 12 million more users than #3 Yahoo!.

A third conference sponsored by Consumer Reports WebWatch is scheduled for September. It will address more trust issues, primarily image validity. The conference aims to raise awareness about doctored photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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