Last week I was forwarded an email that outlines the search
engine strategy of an internet lead/web design company and asked
to comment.

The company offers a large web site consisting of up to 300
pages and 100 of these pages are apparently "doorway pages" that
are designed to be submitted to the search engines for the
purpose of leading a viewer to the main site. The stated purpose
is to create as many top placements in the search engines as
possible. In addition there is a guarantee of a minimum of 6 top
ten positions for relevant search terms in one or more of the 23
search engines they identify as "major" after 90 days or you do
not pay for that month!

Sounds good so far doesn't it? I have a feeling most would stop
reading here and order the system - but wait! Those who decide
to read the rest of the "pitch" and really analyze it will not
be sorry that they did!

It turns out that the "guarantee" is nothing to get excited
about for the "relevant terms" include a couple of terms that
are rare and will not be used by any other web site - which
ensure top placement for those terms for your site and
guarantee they will never have to make good on the "guarantee".

What are these terms? Your name for one and your office name
for another. How many other web sites optomised for your name do
you think you will actually be competing with for search engine
ranking? If you answered zero you are understanding the concept
here

The strategy for submitting the sites to search engines is
designed around software that the company has and not around how
to achieve good search engine ranking - and thus will not work.

That is always the case in situations such as this. Because of
the costs involved when a company is targeting large numbers of
agents and web sites they need an automated system to take care
of the search engine submissions. And automated systems have to
use a strategy that can not fit the requirements of all of the
major search engines.

The alternative to an automated system is to use people who
specialize in search engine optimization and submission to
manually monitor the positions and submit according to the
requirements of each individual search engine. This takes time
for each site but it is the only method the actually works.
Companies who aspire to large numbers of web sites can not use
people to do the job correctly because the costs would be too
high. They have to use and promote systems that are not very
effective.

In this case their strategy regarding the major search engines
is to submit one page from your site to the major search engines
every 25 hours and repeat the cycle once all the pages have been
submitted which they say will take 11 months because of the
number of pages your site will encompass.

They have set up the software in such a way because some search
engines, like AltaVista, are reported to consider it spamming if
more than a couple of pages a day are submitted from a single
domain in a day. AltaVista will delete sites that spam and in
some cases ban them from their results.

But will this system work on other search engines? In most
cases the answer is NO. Other search engines operate differently
and different strategies are required. Some search engines will
list your page and then drop it anywhere from a couple of weeks
to a couple of months later. Under their system you now have to
wait 11 months to get the page back in.

Other search engines will not drop your page after the initial
submit but will penalize if a page is resubmitted when it
already appears in the index. Other search engines may take
multiple submissions in order for the page to appear in the
index - and if a page is only submitted once every 11 months the
page will never appear.

To sum up, there is no replacement for a real live person who
knows how each search engine works and will manually monitor and
submit your site as required by each search engine. There is no
software that can do this and if you are going to use the
services of a company that works with a large number of web
sites your site will not get the search engine rankings you
would like.

RNC Internet Services at http://www.rncinternet.com only works
with one real estate agent per market area and manually monitors
the web site's position in the major search engines and
resubmits as required every few weeks. To see the results of
this check out http://www.results-net.com/rnc/searchenginepositions.html