Well, continuing the rampage against SEO and the companies that provide these services – today I stumbled across http://www.submitplus.com/ (note: although they do offer an affiliate service we dont have an account there and this link is without any refid or similar. Clicking it will not generate anything for us).
Now on their index page they have three levels of paid for service. The cheapest at US$99 per url offers
Guaranteed indexing in major search engines:
Get a jump on the competition with our 6 months indexing program. Promotion includes ‘Page Rank Express’ for Google, Yahoo and MSN
Oddly enough, there is no way anyone (except maybe google) can guarantee indexing by Google, and I can only assume the same applies to Yahoo, MSN etc. Basically they are promising the moon on a stick, knowing that it would incredibly hard for you to try to claim against this promise of theirs.
Looking around their site some more you can easily find more outlandish claims and totally empty promises.
For US$299 they will give you a package which basically sells itself on the google site map (you can get this for free) but the real killer is the US$699 package:
Guaranteed top 10 positions in major search engines:
When surfing Google or Yahoo’s first page, do you ever wonder how those listings got there without using PPCS or ‘Sponsored Ads’?… Chances are we put them there! We have ranked over 5400 (five thousand four hundred) websites within the first pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN using traffic producing targeted keywords since 1998.
Well, well, well. A guaranteed top 10 position in Google. Now looking at the information in the Google webmaster section this seems to be a total falsehood.
Some relevant quotes:
Although we index billions of webpages, we cannot guarantee that we’ll crawl all the pages on a particular site.
and
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise 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 through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps (Beta) program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
It seems, that the claims this SEO company make are falsified straight from the horse’s mouth.
Also, for pure humour purposes I visited the SEO company’s site in a text only browser to see how the site looks to search engine bots etc., and it is truly horrible. I ran it through the W3C validator and it has 59 errors – most down to very basic mistakes that an HTML beginner would be expected to spot (not closing tags etc.) All this flies in the face of their blurb:
Award winning design and cutting-edge web development is part of our everyday optimization portfolio. From search engine compatibility “corrective” design to full online implementation, Submit Plus delivers imaginative and technically brilliant projects.
Fantastic! What a top site.