Unfortunately, where there is a high demand for a product or service in today's world, the temptation to gain a quick profit and move on leads to many scams and general SPAM on the Internet. Even amongst seemingly reputable organisations, there are a dog's breakfast of half-baked schemes, techniques and minimalist services dressed up as Web promotion or even Internet Marketing. Here are a few examples:
Or:
Or:
Even with these guarantees, like the one above, honoured or not, they mislead the customer in thinking they are going to get something of real value. These guys just submit one of your URLs to the Inktomi search engine database, which in turn supplies its results to MSN/NineMSN and a number of very minor search engines. If you are lucky, they will pick a page that they know will at least rank well for one keyword, not necessarily a highly relevant or competitive keyword. The 30 second paid inclusion will cost them the standard fee of $25USD at www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html. Then they pocket the rest. If they decide that they can just change your page title in order to score for a particular, easy, keyword phrase, they may tell you if you are lucky, or they may just play the numbers game and refund those people brave enough to ask for their money back.
The bottom line with these scams is that 'if it were so cheap and easy to do this with a one-time fee then thousands (if not millions) of website owners would do it' and that simply means you would rank no better than most.
What About Clever Tricks to Outwit the Search Engines?
This trickery is sometimes known as 'spamdexing' (ie spamming the index of the Search Engine's database).
You are spamdexing if you are:
- Promoting keywords not at all related to your website or any of your products or services contained within.
- Causing search results to show multiple listings for exactly the same content.
- Violating the search engine's submission limits.
- Hiding text content by using colored text on the same coloured background or making the font too small to read.
- Page swapping.
- Page highjacking.
- Redirecting pages outside of permissible limits.
- Cloaking or stealth scripting.
- Keyword stuffing (repeating text loaded with keywords in hidden areas of your page).
- Placing others' trademarked words in a keyword META tags or within other hidden areas of your page.
WCR Internet Marketing does not employ questionable or unethical Internet Marketing or search engine positioning tactics or techniques. Please refer to our ethical approach to Internet Marketing.
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