Traffic-Power Search Engine Placement - User Feedback? : power, traffic

Answer your own question: http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site is very detailed and describes some of the things "traffic power" is doing. Read up and you be the judge. Good luck!

10.23.2002 at 07:46PM PDT, ID: 7363626

rg20:

I beleive that you can find cheaper companies for this. The other thing is to use effective meta tags.

10.24.2002 at 12:25PM PDT, ID: 7366598

Answer your own question: http://www.searchenginewatch.com.
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I hate to have to ask this, but can you give a specific link? Every page in the site has the words "traffic" and "power" on them. No results for "traffic-power."

Read up and you be the judge
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I'd be interested in your opinion if you have already read it.

Thanks again,
Bill

10.24.2002 at 01:39PM PDT, ID: 7366874

Im sorry, I didnt mean for you to look up specific information regarding Traffic Power. I meant for you to read up on search engine technology. SearchEngineWatch.com is by far the most extensive and exhausted source that I have found on the net. I like this site a lot.

Here are some links that addresses the questions you initially posted.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html talks about meta tags, with a special emphasis on keywords. You said Traffic Power asks for 20 keywords the owner thinks are important. This article will explain to you how useful that is. I think youll be delightfully surprised.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/98/02-bridge.html the attraction pages you talk about are actually called bridge or portal pages. This article will explain this concept a little further detailing its pros and cons.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0711-linktips-long.html this might be the reason why they build a page with nothing but 1000s of link to unrelated sites. Its called link popularity the more sites linking to yours, the more popular you are. Popularity is one way search engines determine whether or not to return your site as a result of a users search. However, this is not always the case: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0417-nec-winners.html.

Ill post my opinion regarding Traffic Power and the likes later.

10.24.2002 at 06:18PM PDT, ID: 7367633

Here is my opinion on the matter.

But first, let me elaborate on that link popularity issue since I think I was somewhat ambiguous. Those 1000s of links are probably links to their other customers. While they are trying to help you, they are continually trying to help their current clients by further increasing link popularity. They probably have their other clients linking to your site as well.

Now, for the beef: of course it would be nice to rank amongst the top of search engine results. Since a lot business wants this, it makes sense to offer a service that attempts to boost a companys rating in search engine results.

Before obtaining such services, I think a company should probably ask itself if it relies heavily on internet traffic for its business. Not all companies depend on this. This is where someone needs to do a study a weight benefits from costs, etc.

Remember that the purpose of search engines is to provide the use with the most relevant results. Different search engines have employed different algorithms to implement this. There is no one standard. Each search engine has its own way of determining relevancy, and whoever does it best becomes the most popular search engine.

In an effort to return the most relevant results and improve its services, search engines continually enhance their algorithms. These constant changes probably would support the argument for soliciting the services of a search engine placement company. It would make sense to rely on a dedicated professional service to handle these matters since this matter is indeed complex.

In the case of Traffic Power, their apparent reliance on keywords seems to contradict the report on SearchEngineWatch.com. Is this dedicated company able to keep up to date with the changes? It appears that is has not. But then again, keywords arent the only consideration many others factor in.

In the end, I think the results should determine whether a search engine placement company is successful or not. Take a few of the keywords you think your customers may use to search for you on the Internet, then try it on some of the popular search engines. If you appear on the first page, then the search engine placement company was very successful. If you do not appear within the results at all, then it may be time to reconsider things.

I suggest you try gain an understanding of search engines first by going to the site I mentioned. That will help you assess your current situation a lot better.

Good luck!

Accepted Solution

10.24.2002 at 06:32PM PDT, ID: 7367672

http://www.northernwebs.com/set/

10.25.2002 at 08:08AM PDT, ID: 7369732

Thank you, kip, for your helpful answers. I know I have more studying to do, but this seems a good place to get opinions from those who have already put in some time on a given subject.

This being my first posted question here, I'm not clear how the boards work. I'm going to click the "Accept Comment as Answer" link, but would still appreciate anyone's specific input on their experience with traffic-power.com.

Another factoid that underlies my suspicions: In Aug, we got 50+ top 10 placements (on 20 key phrases) from msn. When I checked in Sept and twice in Oct, we're getting ZERO. Is it possible that msn SE has blacklisted us??? If so, I would have to think that is due to them not liking the tricks being done by t-p to chum the waters with SE bait. But have had the t-p stuff on the site since Feb, so nothing changed in that regard on my site between Aug. and now.

10.31.2002 at 07:33AM PST, ID: 7392495

Very interesting stuff, I personally subscribe to the SearchEngineWatch Email Newsletter to get the daily dose of news.

I have been doing a lot of research on link popularity. There is a really nice service at http://www.marketleap.com that gives you the link popularity compared to competitors, and gives you results from multiple search engines.

The new hot part of link popularity, is quality linking. Meaning, that link farms have now been detected, so that if you are using a tool such as Free Link Finder, requesting these link pages to add your link to them, will no longer be as effective.

Now they determine if the sites that link to you, are popular, if not, the linking means nothing. So sites like alltheweb will give you great results, google and aol will not.

10.31.2002 at 09:13AM PST, ID: 7393029

Thanks, crosenblum. traffic-power uses a huge file they call "lkpool.htm" which is 100s of links to each of their customers. Sounds like this will be less effective in the future.

We have maybe a dozen 1-page websites that all point back to the main website. So if I put links to each of my 12 on each site, it won't help much.

I'll look into marketleap.com too.

10.31.2002 at 09:30AM PST, ID: 7393112

The key is quality links. So look for sites that are not competitors but have related content, by linking to each other, you provide quality link relationships.

Your method should be looking for good link partners. Then you can have win-win situations.

Another good help is an affiliate program, because that will create an incentive for affiliates to link to content on your sites.

I always like to have a link to the page a visitor is at, for bookmarking or sending to someone else. Or even more have an email this page function. That will increase the chance of leaking.

10.31.2002 at 09:55AM PST, ID: 7393235

>> Your method should be looking for good link partners.

This is a good idea; although rewarding, it may be tedious and time consuming.

10.31.2002 at 09:59AM PST, ID: 7393252

Another thought: how can you determine if a search engine positioning service is successful or not? How about do a search on, say, "search engine positioning" or "search engine positioning service" and see what the results are. Those that place on top are probably a good place to go -- if you're set on obtaining such a service.

10.31.2002 at 10:15AM PST, ID: 7393321

I would hesitate to use a service, one of the methods that my boss uses is overture.com or you can use google.com for their paid keyword system...

For example in overture, you can bid on certain keywords, and those results are sent to search engines. And there is software called bidright where you can bid on certain keywords, and control what your max bid, and position controls...

Other than link partnerships, or keyword bidding, the rest is making sure the basics are covered, by the meta tags, keyword, description, content, and robots tag and file.

The key thing to think about is how are your competitors doing in the search engine results? How much time and money and effort do they seem to be doing, evaluate them over a period of time, to see if they fluctation.

11.02.2002 at 10:57AM PST, ID: 7400636

way2wired:

For an outline of the Traffic Power search engine placement services see:
http://www.traffic-power.com/sep_description.php

As for link popularity, the other htm page that has "links to 1000s of other sites" is not the only link popularity building tool that Traffic Power uses. There are also targeted "themed link pools" (see section 6 on Link Popularity at the link above.) These themed link pools have targeted links that do relate to the business at hand. This link popularity building along with the keywords selection, meta tag optimization, attraction pages etc. should significntly increase a site's searh engine placement.

Here is an example of one of the 25 Traffic Power themed link pool:

http://travel-airline-hotel-vacation.net

I got it from the top of http://www.traffic-power.com/lkpool.html
If you look down the themed page you will see that it contains some of the same link formatted the same way as lkpool.html but only those relating to travel. There are 25 different themed link pool pages listed at the top of the main linkpool page.

04.08.2003 at 01:13PM PDT, ID: 8294662

AHA! I finally found the smoking gun. As the original poster, I felt a follow up was in order.

The methods of Traffic-Power.com are definitely to blame for my client's website being BLACKLISTED by the MSN search engine, starting last Sept. 2002.

http://www.bizresearch.com/internetresearch.htm

This link tells an identical story. Beware the use of "link farms" specifically these pages are named "lkpool.html" by traffic-power.

A few quotes, in case the link changes:

<<We soon learned that our client's site had indeed been blacklisted by MSN,...

Inktomi, an MSN search partner, had indeed blacklisted our client's web site. I was shocked,...

We found a link to our client's web site, www.clientsite.com/lkpool.html. I pointed my browser to this URL up and discovered what is called a "link farm", which listed hundreds if not thousands of links to other sites, some 20-plus pages long. ...

We immediately removed all of the files associated with this company [traffic-power.com], from their site. We removed the link farm code, and rewrote the metatags on the home page. >>

04.08.2003 at 01:20PM PDT, ID: 8294725

Link farms are a big no-no.

If you want the latest on Search Engine Optimization, go where I go. http://www.webmasterworld.com.

It is the number one discussion board on SEO, you always hear the latest se news there.

04.11.2003 at 11:42AM PDT, ID: 8315032

way2wired:

I have used trafficpower and got really good results with them. I called them about this lkpool issue and they said that they no longer use lkpool pages. Those lkpool pages are from a long time ago. Even when they did use them they were not linkfarms. They were links to related sites.

If you look cloesly at the so called "smoking gun" link you'll see that it is written by a competitor and at another SEO company.

If you have questions call traffic power and ask them yourself at (866)424-8535

04.12.2003 at 09:05AM PDT, ID: 8319046

<<Those lkpool pages are from a long time ago. Even when they did use them they were not linkfarms. They were links to related sites. >>
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This is simply not true. They put a brand new lkpool.htm on my site last November, AFTER they started getting blacklisted by MSN in Sept.

When I have called and talked to them about this question, they have been EVASIVE and claimed to have no idea why we were no longer showing up on MSN. They have done nothing since Nov. in spite of our paying MONTHLY fees to remain current. Which means they have not removed the lkpool nor done anything else to help us get back on MSN.

In my opinion, they are misleading and dishonest in their business practices and should be avoided.

03.29.2004 at 02:07AM PST, ID: 10702706

davidtn1:

I nearly signed up with them just to see if it worked but backed out at the last minute due to their high pressure sales techniques.

They kept promising me all kinds of amazing results but when I asked them to put it down in writing in the contract they balked. Eventually they put a very vague version of their verbal "guarantee" in writing but they wanted me to fax them a signed contract with my credit card info while the salesperson stayed on the phone. When I wanted a few days to review I was berated by the salesperson saying that she had bent over backwards etc. etc. (yeah 2 little sentence additions)

In all my years of business I have never come across such high pressure tactics from legitimate businesses. If their system was so good why would they not want to put their guarantees in writing and why would they be so desperate to get someone to sign NOW.

BTW, when I was going to sign I was going to do it on a different domain from the real site just to make sure they didn't get my site banned if their techniques bombed.

My advice is stay away. There is no quick solution that will work long term. I think this outfit knows that that is why they get so much up front and have no out clause.

04.05.2004 at 07:57AM PDT, ID: 10757848

Adam_C:

I would treat this company with a great deal of caution. Any search engine optimisation company that doesn't have their own site listed in Google must be up to something that the search engines don't like.

You can see that these lot aren't indexed by Google on the following URL:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=site:www%2Etraffic%2Dpower%2Ecom

I work for an ethical <a href="http://www.weboptimiser.com" target="_blank">search engine optimisation company</a> and often find SEO's similar to Traffic Power bringing down the reputation of search marketing in general through the use of such dodgy techniques.

Anything that involves linking off to 100's of other domains sounds very suspect indeed. In fact, as these sites are on different subjects this can harm your positions in Google as the theme of the site will be contaminated.

There are a growing number of good SEO's out there now - many (including us) - will often charge a lot more than the price mentioned above. Many SEO's have also switched from the dark side and are now providing strictly ethical services.

A good place to look would be the Marketing Sherpa reports or some of the SEO consultants directories that are out there.

04.09.2004 at 03:45AM PDT, ID: 10790220