Services To Avoid

There are some traffic generating services on the Internet you should try to avoid. Some of them are useless and a waste of time and some are useful but may damage your site's ranking. I will also list some suspicious services and services that provides "unethical" advertising.

You see, your reputation on the Internet is very important if you wish to succeed. Therefore, besides building it, you must try not to ruin it by using inappropriate traffic services. Some of these services are even illegal.

I will try to list some here. I will be updating this section from time to time, so please come and visit it every now and then.

1. Spamming and the use of blacklists

This is No. 1! Whatever you do, don't spam! Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Unsolicited means that the recipient has not granted you permission for the e-mail to be sent. Sending unsolicited e-mail messages mollests and offends people. And it is even illegal in some countries and may subject you to civil or criminal penalties.

Blacklist is a list of e-mails that are usually gathered by a spam robot. These robots are similar to search engine spiders, but instead of indexing pages they collect e-mail addresses. Then these blacklists are used for mass e-mail campaigns by spammers.

2. E-mail blasters and suspicious safelists

You have probably seen a lot of ads online about blasters and suspicious safelists. Many of these services are sending spam on your behalf. Every time you see some ad about "sending your e-mail to millions of users", or "sending your ad to a millions of opt-in subscribers", be sure to check out thoroughly if those lists are really safelists before you decide to use them.

E-mail marketing is very effective if used properly. Therefore, if you are using this form of advertising, be sure to take all the necessary precautions to avoid being accused of spam.

If you use an autoresponder, make sure you place an unsubscribe link in all your messages. You should also log IP addresses of your subscribers, so you have proof that they subscribed.

If you decide to use free, or paid safelists, e-zines, GPTRE, or some other form of e-mail marketing campaign, make sure their subscribers are 100% opt-in.

3. Posting links to FFA pages and other link farms

Posting your link to FFA (Free For All) pages and other link farms is useless. These sites will display your link, but your link will be mixed with a thousand of others. Noone will probably even see your link. Link farms will offer you an option to submit your link to a thousands (or millions) of FFA pages.

Don't use these services since they will only collect your e-mail address and than use it to send you various offers and spam messages.

The other downside of these links is how will Search Engines treat them. They will most likely ignore them, or they may damage your ranking, since this is considered as a "link spam" technique.

If you still desire to try out these services, create a free e-mail account for this purpose, since you'll be getting a lots of e-mails.

4. Cloaking

Cloaking is used to trick Search Engine spiders in order to gain higher ranking. I'll try to explain. There is a certain difference on how a Search Engine sees your site and how does your visitor. Search Engines rank your page based on a certain keyword density, relevance, number of pages, links to it, etc. See more at SEO. Your visitor is interested more in your site looks and information.

If your site was designed especially for a Search Engine spiders, your visitors would only see a mess of keywords on your pages. Cloaking is based on this difference.

Cloaking software monitors all your page visitors. When it recognizes a Search Engine spider, it generates a thousands of keyword rich pages and tricks Search Engine into believing that your site has much more pages than it truly has and ranks it higher.

Cloaking is not appretiated by Search Engines. If you are discovered, your site will be banned from their listings.

Also if you plan to hire some SEO Service, or SEO expert, make sure they don't use cloaking, or some other inappropriate service.

5. Other services

There are many scams and other inadecvate marketing services on the Internet. Before using any of these service, or any other service for that matter, always make sure you know:

- what are they doing and how?
- is it legal?
- will it bother or offend anyone?
- are their claims realistic?
- what are necessary requirements and skills?
- what kind of results you can expect from them?
- what risks are involved?

Think it through completely before you make any move and you will succeed!

I hope you enjoyed visiting my site and found some useful information. Attaining your goals is not impossible, but it requires much time and dedication on your part. Stay focused and you will succeed. I wish you best of luck with your online ventures!

Best regards,
Jaksa Dubljanin