Does PageRankSubmit Measure Up?

There are so many sites out there advertising how they will provide you with great SEO, it’s hard to wade through the muck.  Every site has big promises, and more often than not they end up disappointing on those promises.  For better or for worse, I’ll do my best to keep you updated on my experiences so you can avoid the disasters and flock to the successes.  It’s nice to sit in my blogging lair today and bang out an article on the latter, a website that successfully delivered on (at least some of) the hype.

You probably found this site in a search for a review of PageRankReview.com, so I’ll do my best to cut to the chase.  If my reviews are honest and thorough, you’ll hopefully come back to check out my other reviews.  I was happy with PageRankReview and I’m in the process of using them for all of the sites I manage (see the Blogroll on right).  In my opinion I got $100 to $200 of SEO for $29.  It didn’t save the world, but it did get my site to show up in the first few pages of Google.

The claim from PageRankSubmit.com is that they will submit you to 100 Internet directory sites for $29 (price as of this post).  They say the sites all have a PageRank of PR4 or higher.  When you are finished, they will send you an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of the sites to which you were submitted and their PageRank.  All entries are manually submitted by their team, so you don’t have to worry about CAPTCHA issues blocking non-human entries.

In reality, I found they were pretty close to their promise.  They actually submitted my site to 101 directory sites.  I did a PageRank lookup and not all of the sites were still at their advertised PageRank, but remarkably most of them were.  My biggest concern was that some of the directories would be in Google so-called “bad neighborhoods” and that I would be penalized for it.  As far as I can tell, none of the directories had bad reputations with Google.

PageRankSubmit.com doesn’t guarantee that you will actually get listed in the directories, however, I again found that most of the sites did add me to their listings.  There are a few that didn’t, or that say they’re entirely too busy to get around to your post for the next ump-teen months.  Whatever.  There are always a few bad apples, but I prefer not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

A note to those who still have nascent SEO skills: be sure to pick a good title.  For example, Internet Starting would work, but it wouldn’t get me the Google exposure I’m looking for.  Find your top keywords (preferably from your Google Analytics account) and try to work them into your title.  For example, I used InternetStarting – Internet Business Starting.  Because PageRankSubmit is actually handled by real people, they tend to adjust the title according to the directories rules.  If this were run by a bot (an automated submission robot), for example, they might try to submit anchor text that was too long and got my submission disqualified.  Another example is for DVDCorral.com, I used DVDCorral – Personal DVD Library.  After submitting this, Google started to show DVDCorral in search results for “Personal DVD Library” — In fact, after just checking I found DVDCorral ranked #2 in Google for “Personal DVD Library”.  Looks like it worked very well!  Be sure to create a title that includes a few good keywords for your own site as well as the actual name of your site.

What happens next?  Well, prepare to get about 100 e-mails from these directory sites confirming your submissions.  I find that it usually takes 15 minutes in 3 or 4 different increments to finalize all of the submissions.  Usually it’s just clicking a link to complete the process.  A word to the wise, setup an e-mail account specifically for this submission if at all possible.  For example, I typically use first.last@mywebsite.com whenever I do a new submission.  That way if any of the sites decides to sell your e-mail you don’t have to get it in your general mailbox.  Setting up a similar account should be pretty simple to do with your web provider.

For the first couple of weeks you’ll see confirmations continue to roll in.  Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines will continue to find these sites over time and adjust your rank accordingly.  It will take about a month for everything to eventually settle out.  In fact, I just received a notification recently for a site I submitted a few months ago.  That’s just a little more link love Google will be sending my way.

In all, I felt PageRankSubmit offers a pretty good service for a very fair price.  In fact, I felt it was good enough to go join their affiliate program.  Disclaimer: While I do participate in their affiliate program, that is because I feel they have a good product at a good price.  I have had other affiliate sites that I gave a negative review to and those sites won’t appear under our “Recommended Sponsors” section.  This is my honest review and if you liked it, hopefully you’ll follow this link and:

Boost Your Page Rank!

At first glance, I liked the site.  They had a pretty simple interface to make use of a number of different advertising methods, so I thought this might be interesting.  I was unfortunately disappointed.

As with most sites, they offer to list you in search engines.  I decline, because I’m already either crawled by all the search engines or I automatically submit to them.  Caveat Emptor!  Submitting to tons of search engines isn’t usually useful as 75% – 90% of your traffic will end up coming from Google.  Less than 1% of your traffic will come from these 100 search engines (or whatever ridiculous number someone is advertising).  Don’t bother, it isn’t worth the effort.  Yes — even if that is no effort at all.  The worst case is that they submit you multiple times and one of the useful search engines delists you because of over-submission.

Alright, but they have this nifty “Ad Network”.  Let me see how this works.  As always, I’m looking for any useful way I can exchange links, etc. to get a boost on the Google SERPS.  If I run an ad on my site, they’ll display my site on other sites.  That’s what the documentation says, anyway.  When I talked to their rep, he explained that showing their ads on my page doesn’t cause my ads to be shown any more often.  I showed their ads over 300 times and they showed mine once.  Ok, shut that one off.

How about FastTraffic?  That sounds like a good idea.  They use domain names that are expired, but which still receive some traffic.  Then that traffic gets routed to your site.  Sounds like a nifty way to pick up traffic that might actually be interested in my site (they claim its targeted).  The rep sets me up for the free version which guarantees (or your money back??) 2000 hits.  Cool.  2000 hits — I’ll take it!  Not so fast, bucco!  I’ve had 314 visits and 5 of them have clicked on another page.  5!  That’s a bounce rate of 98.4% on a page that has a bounce rate much closer to 50%.  The fact that 5 people have clicked onto a second page makes me feel like it isn’t a bot, but I’m not sure it’s exactly what I’d call targeted traffic either.

What’s left?  Oh, the 5-day trial.  Yeah, there’s a catch there too.  The 5-day trial is only a trial if you don’t… well, try anything.  If you sign up for any of the services, then you automatically forfeit your first month’s subscription fee.  That’s not any kind of trail I’ve ever heard of.  Besides, I’m a fan of the Sam Walton style of customer service.  It’s rumored that the following exchange once happened at an early WalMart meeting:

Sam: “If a customer wants his money back — give it to him!  I don’t care if he rolls a used tire down the asile and wants to return it.”

Manager on staff: “Umm, Mr. Walton… WalMart doesn’t sell tires.”

Sam: <looks man straight in the eyes and replies> “I said, Give him his money back!”

Well, hopefully I paid my $9.99 to save you the agony.  So, when you see advertisers that I promote here on the blog, know that they offer services that I have used and appreciate.  If someone does a terrible job, I promise not to tell you they did an ok job just so I can make a couple of bucks on the affiliate program.  In this case, if you get a chance to check out EngineSeeker.com — go ahead and pass on that “opportunity”.