Today’s question hails from {site removed for privacy} Don:

Don asks:

[Company name removed] is offering to sell me keywords for $800 each. They say that my site will pop up on top of all results IF the searcher has downloaded their program. They say over 10 million people have it loaded already. What can you do for me for that much money?

Don, thank you for your question!

If I understand this correctly, they’re offering to sell you ONE keyword for $800, and that the only way your site will show up is if the person searching is using their “special” program, right?

And over 10 million users? Wow, that’s a lot, considering their domain was only registered in May of this year, their Alexa ranking is close to one million (which essentially means that they are the one millionth (1,061,673 to be exact, as of today) most popular site on the internet).

I have a hard time believing this will do you or your site any good at all, for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost that I’ve never even heard of that company, nor have I ever heard of that tactic to get clients. What it sounds like is the old quacky emails people would get offering them “150 links to your site for $99!”. Okay, but what kind of links? Are they relevant to my niche? Are they all hosted on the same server, and owned by the same company? That last one was so typical at one point, where I’d get requests for link exchanges for a client who owned a bed and breakfast on a supposed dental resource site!

Another thing I found, was that according to Google, Yahoo, Alexa, and MSN - there are NO sites linking to them. Not a single one. Wouldn’t you think that if a company’s service were THAT well used, and THAT fantastic, that people would be linking to it?

Here’s the bottom line - if it sounds like anything other than natural, organic listings in the search engines that EVERYONE uses, it’s more than likely some sort of scam that’s not only NOT going to get you what you could get by hiring a real SEO/Marketing company, but it could wind up hurting your site in the long run. The search engines are well known for penalizing sites that use trickery or sneaky tactics for getting listings. Is that what you want for your company? I doubt it.

Depending on your site’s current listings, current rankings, and where you’re willing to make changes, as well as your budget, we can develop a plan to get you NATURAL results that are available to anyone and everyone using the search engines (as they are, without “special software”) to find you, as well as people who are using directories or other authority sites to find you. And it might even wind up being less money!

(Don, I’ll be contacting you privately to discuss what Anubis Marketing can do for you “for that kind of money” since it largely depends upon your site specifically.)

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