hiee dis is [name withheld to protect the silly] n i hav got over 4 years of experience in Internet mktg n in overall SEO n SEM operations? n wud like to serve u people with my efforts? M luking for any work at home opportunities Related with the SEO n SEM operations, Or anything related with an Internet Marketing, n when i works, u can c the results ASAP, I know exactly, how to improve the website’s Rank Rapidly n quickly on search engines, cos I hav got the Creative ideas n diff n innovative techniques by which We can deliver tons of traffic everyday to any website. so i can ensure the quality work for u people? So for further details u can hav a luk to my CV In Attachment. hope n wish to hear positive frm u people Thanx Regards [name]

I don’t like to make fun of people, so I held onto this email for a few days, but then I decided it was just too good to not share.

Yeah, stupid. I’ve found when you make a mistake the best thing to do is to own up to it, and then find something interesting you can learn from it. Aside from learning to check the stats on my blog more than once every three months, I’ve also learned that the robots.txt file actually works. Yeah, in fact it works really, really well. This graphic says it all:

That’s what happens when your robots.txt settings look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Not all that different than:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Wouldn’t you say? But it’s quite different. It’s the difference between having your site almost completely de-indexed or having your site indexing marvelously. So kids, learn from my mistake and don’t do this at home, at work, or anywhere else unless you actually want to avoid the search engines.

Update: Since posting this, it has come to my attention that there is no “About OrangeSoda” paragraph at the end of the press release, although there is one for REMAX, which might indicate that this press release wasn’t even issued by OrangeSoda, but perhaps by REMAX, which affects some of the comments I’ve made below about OrangeSoda.

Any SEO professional knows that it’s easy to get a company ranking well in Google for that company’s name, especially if that company’s name is present in the URL the company uses for its website. For example, if I have a company named Purple Monkey Dishwasher and I own the URL PurpleMonkeyDishwasher.com, then it’s going to be a snap to get the #1 spot in Google when people search for “purple monkey dishwasher”. But what if Purple Monkey Dishwasher is a bike shop located in Tampa, Florida? What good does it do me to rank well for “purple monkey dishwasher” in that case? The only benefit I get is that people who already know who I am will be able to find me. But they’re going to find me anyway if they’re looking for me. The problem is I’m not going to get any new customers.

That’s more or less what is being trumpeted as search engine optimization success in this press release from Utah-based SEO firm OrangeSoda, only the company is REMAX of New Jersey. As stated in the release “When people search Google or another search engine for homes for sale in new jersey, or on our brand name, they’ll see RE/MAX New Jersey at the top of the list. Thanks to our partnership with OrangeSoda we’re seeing top results on many real estate keywords,” said Jeanie Farrell of RE/MAX New Jersey.

Now there’s the thousand-dollar question; is the REMAX site really showing up in the top results for “many real estate keywords” or just the company name? According to the Google Keyword Tool the top five real estate/homes for sale related keywords with accompanying search volumes are:

new jersey real estate – 368,000
new jersey homes – 201,000
new jersey homes for sale – 110,000
new jersey homes sale – 110,000
homes in new jersey – 22,200

By comparison searches for “remax new jersey” total approximately 2,900 per month.

The New Jersey REMAX website doesn’t show up in the top 10 search results for any of these keywords, and doesn’t show up in the top 100 search results for the fifth. To be fair, the site is showing up in the 10-20 results for the first four keyword searches. While not exactly “top results” you could make the argument that the site is “on it’s way” to the top, assuming the current rankings are an improvement over what they were before REMAX New Jersey started working with OrangeSoda. Or I suppose you could even make the argument that those are “top rankings” if by “top rankings” you mean anything within the first 20 results.

What really matters, of course, is whether New Jersey REMAX is getting more business as a result of this campaign than they would otherwise. Judged from that perspective, it could be that coming up in the top results for searches for “REMAX” could be generating a net gain, and that being in the top 20 results for keywords that are heavily searched also generates results good enough to justify the expense of OrangeSoda’s SEO services.

Why bother posting about this at all? Primarily because I think it’s misleading. The release puts forth the idea that OrangeSoda is doing great things for REMAX New Jersey by getting them ranking well for searches for their company name, which isn’t much of a challenge, nor is it likely to generate much in the way of real improvement to the client’s revenues. Ranking for the other terms listed above is likely to provide real value
for the client, but rankings that aren’t in the top 10 aren’t exactly newsworthy.

The bottom line is that if you’re a client looking to hire an SEO company, make sure you’re getting a true positive return on your investment, based on a clear comparison of what results you would be getting without the SEO firm vs. with them.

It looks like you have several PR clients in [state]? I am proposing a partnership where you could monopolize on some of your client’s needs when otherwise you would simply tell them you ‘don’t know’.

We are a web design and internet marketing firm that specializes in search engine optimization. We have found partnering with PR firms has been very successful in the past for the PR firm and us. You may have clients that ask about professional web design or internet marketing services. From now on if you refer them you can choose between a referral fee of $500 per client, 10% of all recurring revenue, or $1,000 credit of internet marketing services for your own website.

We provide professional internet marketing services such as SEO, Pay-per-click, banner ads, link building campaigns, and more. We also have a very successful retention rate. We have only had one client stop services so far and that was because they were receiving too many leads from their website.

Getting the word out is fairly easy, we can provide you with some articles on internet marketing or how web design can improve conversion rates that you can distribute via a newsletter, email, or other forms of communication you have with your clients.

If you are interested I would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have or send you some references. Feel free to contact me via email or 801-495-4402.

One example is redirects. When you migrate your website to a new domain name–that is, your old website was redcars.com but you’re going to copy all your content and files over to bluecars.com and use that domain instead–you’re going to lose all your rankings in Google unless you tell them where they can find your new website. You can do this using a redirect which will redirect visitors to your old domain to your new domain.

There are two kinds of redirects. A “302 redirect” is a temporary redirect, while a “301 redirect” is permanent. Without going into technical detail about each one, there were SEO professionals recommending as recently as a year ago that the 302 redirect would do the best job preserving your site’s rankings in Google. The idea was that the temporary redirect would preserve the rankings of your old site until the new one got indexed, while the 301 would cause your rankings to immediately drop until the new site was indexed. See “Want To Switch to a New Domain? 301 Redirects vs. 302 Redirects” for more detail.

However, it appears that 302 redirects are not recommended by Google and your site may suffer a worse fate in the rankings by using a 302 rather than a 301. For the record, at MWI we recently rebuilt our own website and we used 301 redirects to take care of redirecting traffic from old urls to the new ones, since we had changed the entire file structure and the 301 redirects worked quite well, preserving our rankings almost perfectly. Apparently 302 redirects may have worked well in the past but the 301 is preferred by Google today.

But the point here isn’t so much about whether 302s or 301s are better, the point is that if an SEO professional doesn’t stay up on the trends then what worked well a few months ago might do damage today. I don’t know why anyone who purports to be an SEO expert would not stay up on these things. It’s not that hard to subscribe to a few blogs and keep up. But apparently many of these so-called experts think they learned everything they need to know five years ago and don’t realize that SEO is an ongoing service in part because things like this keep changing. Even a year can make a big difference.