CogBlog

In 1997 I co-founded COGBOX in with Michelle DeCol. Since then we've offered online marketing, web development and corporate and brand identity to a wide range of clients. Here I post thoughts and comments on search marketing, recent projects, and other things I find interesting.

Guaranteed Top Positions for Xanadaculous!

Published Thursday, February 21, 2008 by chris | E-mail this post

Occasionally we're asked our opinion of certain marketing companies out there who seem to make fantastic claims for incredibly low prices. Claims like "guaranteed top search positions" for a low low price. Two questions that come to mind are :

Top positions for what phrases?
Generally achieving top positions for obscure terms is pretty straight-forward. Most site owners probably have a number of top positions right now for some combination of words and phrases that appear on their site right now. Of course, what matters is whether anyone else actually uses those phrases in search.

Top positions on what sites?
Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo. Those are the sites that matter. And if you do well there, you'll do well everywhere else. So that claim (that I fortunately do hear less often these days) that we'll submit your sites to 50, 100, or 1,000 of the top sites, just doesn't hold any water. You don't need to do it.

So, in honor of these shady sites I'm coining a new term : Xanadaculous. Xanadaculous means a spectacular claim that is both mythical (like Xanadu in the movie by the same name) and awful (also like the movie). Amazingly enough, google currently finds no results for the term Xanadaculous.