The Top Ten Internet Marketing Scams -- Watch Out!

Hi Justine:  It comes down to there is no FREE ride it takes hard work just like everything else in life, other than the free gift from our savior.

Great post Justin.  Especially the part about reciprocal links :-)

It is amazing that people still buy into this stuff.  Hopefully, you'll save a couple from throwing money in the toilet.

One has to be careful about all the scams out there when it sounds to good to be true leave it alone because ,there is no free lunch in America, thanks for the tips great posts.

If it seems too good to be true.... we have all heard it. However, taking short cuts is a way of life in American business. There will, unfortunately, always be a market for these scammers!

Yeah, I almost fell for one of those "guaranteed top spots" until I talked to them and they were guaranteeing one that I wouldn't think would get any traffic at all. 

"If it sounds like the infomercial you watched last night when you couoldn't get backto sleep..."

there is no magic, and it is the new folks who need to hear that news.  They're the ones most likely to jump on these scams, as they try to get up to speed overnight.

Great points to make Justin. I own a company called Innovative Internet Solutions, we do SEO as one of our services. We don't make any guarantees that we of course CAN'T guarantee. We simple do the work to optimize websites for search engines through keywords (not spamming them!), proper meta tags, site indexing, and many little things that help our websites get noticed by search engines. We base our SEO primarily on Google's standards.

Terrific information, Justin. The emails and the calls about these are ceaseless. I ignore them completely but I suspect many fall for them otherwise they would at some point stop. I just got an email from some dignitary or something or other in some country (nope, not Nigeria) through AR the other day. Rude!

Jeff

Great article. I keep hearing conflicting things about reciprocal links.... It's VERY confusing for the average online Realtor to know if they're good, bad, or indifferent....

Hmmm....I've never heard of some of them. I am going to read the rest......thanks for the information!

Thanks for the warning!

Justin thanks for this post. I love the graphic too! I'm going to imagine it every time I pick up a telemarketing call!

I don't want to be number one for a totally obscure search phrase that only a monkey could type at random, I want highly targeted, real world phrases! The only way to do that is great quality content and consistent site updates.

The real estate sales industry is near the top (might BE the top) of all professions for targeting by all these carney-barkers. We must look like well paid sucker fish to the bottom feeders on the internet. Have you seen the guys that sell the list of "all the Realtors" and "all the lenders" in the free world? But they only sell each list once!! Yeah, right! Soon after that e-mail made the rounds (and don't bother trying to get off - that only confirms the accuracy of their database) I began getting load sof e-mail directed to mortgage brokers... Someone got the list backwards, and now I'm solicited up & down for "the lowest rates & highest payouts" or some such drivel... Thanks to MailWasher, I only see the header for 2 seconds as it gets bounced, but I know it's there, and it is annoying. A pox on all of 'em!.

For some reason I just thought we'd see a list of all the nigerian scams out there.....if only I had a dime for everytime some scammer offered me millions.....

I would argue with you little bit about points you are making. I am in the industry so I see many sides to this problems.

1) The primary search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN and you are right, you just need to submit to those search engines only. But why you want to stop there? I hope you know that positioning on search engines is determined by how many links point to your website. More links are there, the higher the search engine ranking.

If you are talking about just getting submitted, than there is no reason whatsoever to submit your website any further.

But if you want to get ranking, some of those services are legit and they really do the job right. You mentioned if search engine knows you exist, why would you submit? The reason that many webmaster do that is to gain more incoming links to their websites.

I will give you example. Go to Google and type in "click here". What website do you see on top? You should see Adobe site. Go to their site and find the keyword "click here". There is none!

So how it is possible that this site ranks no.1 on Google for keyword "click here"? IT is because many other websites, search engines have a link called "click here" that points to Adobe site.

Therefore not only small search engines, but also blogs etc influenced this ranking.

Also you have to understand that not all search engines are Google yahoo and msn. Those small search engines try to keep their databases current and any page that is outdated is removed.  So re-submitting of your site does help bring pages back to index. Small search engines usually drop outdated pages every 5-7 days.

I think majority of people understand only few search engines or better major ones like Google, so not many people see benefit in this at all. But if you hire an SEO manager, this is most of the time first thing to do. Create more incoming links!

 

2) The sentence appears in many advertisements and I do agree it is somewhat misleading, but not inaccurate. Yes, you can get on top in Google and yes you can choose your own keywords. You have to understand keyword density in your text, what Google will look for in text and how to properly position your keywords in text. This with incoming links from small search engines will help your ranking.

 3) I would agree with you that 39.95 for 2K of back links is not the best offer. However, NOONE knows if your ranking will improve or not. The reason is that NOONE know how Google, yahoo or msn algorithm works. Just because this may not work for your website, it may work for a different type of website.

Every website content is unique and Google will look at your individual site very differently.

I am not saying go and but those services, but try to gain your own opinion about these services.

I came up with an idea this morning, I'm going to google "SEO - St. Louis" and see who has the top rankings...that should tell me who has a handle on this stuff!

 

R.B. "Bob" Mitchell

ValueList Real Estate Services, inc.

Justin,

The doorway pages tool that we offer is used by our most advanced webmasters who like the tool.

We however, do not encourage anyone out there who does not know how to use this tool to use it all.

I am not here on this website promoting my services at all Justin. If you see my posts or blog you will see that I write about search engines, marketing etc. But let me clarify something since you brought our services.

Our service let's user choose where they want to submit their website. It is not that we take your money and do this submission for you. Everything from our side is automated and you select what web-sites you want to submit, you create title, description, keywords than you select in what industry your website belongs to. After that you will see a list of search engines that you will select from. User will choose what search engines they want to submit to which most SEO companies do not offer such tools.

Worse many SEO companies out there use "bulk" submission that submits to same resources over and over again. So I do agree with you that you have to be careful about certain SEO marketing.

Many people have this idea that submitting to Google, Yahoo , MSN is enough and rest is simply waste of time. Let's take Yahoo. Yahoo is not a search engines but directory. Yahoo's goal is to get webmaster to pay their $299 fee to be listed and most of the time their directory is worthless because most of their users use search portion of their website. So the goal is to get listed on as many search engines, directories, ffa links.....because many search engines pick this up and will get you listed much faster on google, msn, yahoo, etc.

I am not here to say that our tool is the only answer to all search engine problems. By looking at your website you have many links that you have build over time such as writing blogs, posting comments, etc, and I know you are doing a right thing with your web-site.

But as I mentioned why stop there? In business you want to grow it, you want to create recognition. Not many people have lots of money they can spend online to promote their website. Everyone enjoys free traffic from search engines, but what if there were no search engines?

Justin, I am not here to promote any SEO services, but rather educate people about all of this.