Hi
There are plenty of places who say they can “guarentee” you a high ranking in google, for a mere $5000 and such, but can (do?) any of them actually deliver? Are there any reputable companies out there at all? Or is it just a scam?
Or is it really just a matter of, the more sites that link to you, the higher you’re going to rate?
abby
I think those companies use a better breed of pigeon than google actually does itself. Google sometimes prides itself on collecting them from parks and such, thus solving 2 problems at once, but it seems that by spending a few extra dollars, you can get one that pecks at higher rates and doesn’t tire as much.
Find out more here.
I knew it!
Off to find some pigeons. Anyone have some bread I can borrow?
Seeing as no one else replied… 
All I can say is that Goggle ranks pages based on how many other sites link to them. Many people link to CNN which is why it appears pretty high up when you google ‘news’. But not many people link to your site which is why it isn’t on page 1.
But Goggle now decides the importance of the web page linking to you. So if one very popular site links to you it’s worth a hell of a lot more than if 50 unknown sites link to you.
What these people do, I don’t know exactly, but for that cash I would expect to be getting pretty good results !
if you’re interested you could check out more on how it works:
and
Pigeons ruin the thought process, y’see.
But who knows, for 5K, I’d gladly set up a Google bomb (tons of other web pages linking to yours, thereby increasing its apparent relevance) for ya 
The basic idea is, if you want your site to be seen as being about Barium Enemas, and I get a bunch of other sites (blogs, etc) to link to you using the phrase “barium enemas”, your page will eventually be seen as highly relevant to barium enemas, even if your page is really about drop-kicking Barbie dolls.
The specific “how” of companies that offer to do this I can’t give you, but it’s bound to play on that same principle.
Yeah but if you create 100 sites with nothing on them but a load of crap and a link to your real site then it woun’t do any good unless other sites, that have a high pageranking chez goggle; are linking to the 100 that you create.
A load sites with a poor google ranking which point at your site, gives you a site with a poor google ranking 
I also wanted to say that I wouldn’t actually pay anyone to do this, for a few reasons. 1) Google’s results can’t be directly influenced - no one can get a deal with Google to rank a page higher. 2) The dynamic nature of the internet almost guarantees that today’s number 1 is tomorrow’s number 4. A good example of this came along when I was participating in the “Declarations thread” where we were posting the Declaration of Independence by using each word as the first word of a post. I had to resort to searching for it eventually, and instead of being smart and bookmarking it, I just kept going back to the same search. It was the same exact search (using the history in my Google toolbar), and over the course of a week, the site that I was using dropped from fourth to somewhere on the second page. So maybe 5 grand will get you results today, but I am certain that the person who takes your money has no intent on maintaining your rank in any way. 3.) There are better things to drop that kind of money on if you’re running a business, like making sure your website will actually bring in business once anyone gets there from a search engine at all.
Actually, there are many different things you can do to get better Google rankings. Many people are paid by big companies to do nothing but get the company’s sites ranked higher. Some of the people offering services to others are very good at what they do.
Knowing just the parts I know, I was able to get a bellydance instructor’s site ranked #1 for her area (large city on the East coast name + “belly dance” and other variations on that search) up from something like #57 within one month’s time. I’ve got a number of my own pages at #1 for specific terms. And of course the trick is to do things that are both helpful to your ranking AND aren’t at all spammy. The people who do things that make the pages look crappy but inflate their ranking are the ones who get slammed and the rankings dropped low the next month or so after Google figures out what they are doing.
Of course if you get spam about it, ignore those people completely. And anyone whose own site doesn’t show up high in the rankings certainly shouldn’t be paid to mess with your site.
Don’t waste your money. The best way to guarantee that your site comes up on Google based on certain search terms is to pay Google itself.
Thanks for the responses, guys - much appreciated.
Terminus Est, the thing about AdWords, tho, is that like most people (I think?), I ignore adwords because I’m not looking to spend money, I’m looking for an answer to my question for free. It’s not a logical argument, of course, but that’s my mentality. And I suspect pretty much everyone else works the same way when using google.
Unless you’re using it like the YellowPages, of course.
a
The Google ads cost you, the Google user, absolutely nothing. Clicking on the ad also costs nothing. It’s up to you whether you buy anything from the website that comes up.
I look at the ads occasionally. I’ve followed them a few times, if they seem relevant. A couple times, I’ve actually bought something. Other times, I’ve used the results to buy the same product from another site.
Not quite Google, but from back when AltaVista was the dominant search engine: Once, I was looking for a particular piece of software (and was willing to pay for it, depending on the price), and the search itself came up empty… But the ad at the top of the “sorry, no results” page was for the very piece of software I was looking for.
Of course, with an otherwise empty search, paying to get higher in the rankings isn’t exactly necessary, but…
With AltaVista companies could pay to be higher ranked. With Google, though, the only payment strategy they offer is the adwords which I personally find to be fairly effective since they are direct and unintrusive.
And about those people who want you to pay money to push up the ranking at Google is that Google hates them and is constantly working to undermine them. If you can easily artificially increase the ranking at Google then Google loses its value as a search engine. When Google finds a new method of pushing up results they change the search to break it. In some cases Google will delist a site for using these methods and refuse to add it back to the search.
Do you have examples of this happening? There are constant drives to get Google to change its results because of Google-bombing, but Google has, AFAIK, always refused. For example, the “miserable failure” Google bomb that lists GWB’s White House bio as the first hit. There was some serious urging for Google to fix it, but Google refused to change their algorithms, and the Google-bomb still stands.
Bolding mine.
Amongst other things, I happen to do professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) Anyone who claims that for a fee they can guarantee a high ranking in Google is a scam, or deluded. Even if I have pretty much cracked the Google algo and know how to get a site to rank well, I could have no way of knowing that Google might not shortly dramatically change the algo tomorrow. One cannot guarantee anything unless they have control of all the variables.
HOWEVER, a good SEO can greatly increase the chances of a site doing well in Google. Biggest problem that I have encountered is that there are a huge number of website designers who are clueless about how to design a site with ranking well in search engines in mind. And site owners don’t realize this. Most common scenario is web designers who have a background in print design. They think along the ideas what makes for a good site is the same as what makes for a good magazine ad. Visually appealing, and lures in the customer. Search engine algos are pretty much the reverse. Search engines do everything by computer. Computers have no sense of aesthetics. In fact, they tend to favor butt ugly sites. For example, search engines like pages that have lots of robot readable text, with lots of repetition of keywords. Here’s one example of how to design a web page wrong:
WHY is the text “FIGHTING IGNORANCE SINCE 1973” inside a .gif, instead of indexable text? No wonder this site is not on page 1 for a Google search for “fighting ignorance”. As a SEO I could easily redesign that page to rank high on page 1 for the “fighting ignorance” search.
There are lots of other tricks like this SEOs know. If it was worth thousands of dollars a month for this site (or any other) to rank high on Google for “fighting ignorance”, paying me a measly $5000 to do so would be a no-brainer decision. Best strategy I know for a SEO is to market themselves to clients as a website design consultant. Split the site design budget into so much for a site designer who knows how to create pages that look appealing to customers to convert visitors into sales. (Little profit in getting lots of people to click on your site because it ranks #1 on Google, and get few conversions because they quickly surf away because it looks unprofessional.) The SEO earns his pay by telling the site designer how he MUST alter the appearance iof the site to do well in Google.
There is a lot more to SEO than that. For example, it isn’t a matter of how many sites that link to you counts to rank well in Google, but WHICH sites link to you, and HOW they link to you. For more about that, I won’t tell unless you get out your checkbook.
How many people are going to search for the Straight Dope with the terms “Fighting ignorance”?
Except for the linking part, Google guards its ranking secrets better than the CIA.
It’s spy versus spy – whenever Google finds out one of their methods have been discovered, they change it.
SEs are about the users, not the webmasters. If Google didn’t behave the way they do, the value of the SE would go down for users.
Plenty of folks have answered the first part of your question. Yes, it’s a scam.
As to the second part, it’s more complex than that. Although, as aahala pointed out, the exact algorithms are closely-guardeed secrets, many of the factors influencing the results are not well-publicized by the search engine companies themselves. They basically boil down to this: accurately describe the content of your pages in ways that the spiders can understand.
For example, in a search for “fighting ignorance” (henceforth, “FI”):
A page with FI in a first-level header (H1 tag) will rank higher than a page with FI in a third-level header (H3 tag).
Pages with FI higher on the page (earlier in the file) will rank better
Pages that are linked to by other popular pages with FI in the link tag will rank better
Pages with FI in the keywords, page title, or description will rank better.
and so forth. Google and the other engines also have ways to knock down people trying to influence the ratings. Your page will actually rank worse if you hide the FI by making it the same color as the background, or repeat it 100 times, or write it in extremely tiny text, or create pages with nothing but links to your page, or…
The rules are always changing, but if you use logical descriptions and garner a lot of legitimate links, you’ll rise in the rankings.
The key is that bit about accurately reflecting the opinions on the Web. When one of these for-pay entities tries to push your site, they’ll create link farms of many thousands of auto-generated pages containing basically nothing but links to each other and to target sites. This does not accurately reflect the opinions of Web users as a whole; it reflects the opinions of one or two guys with money. So Google does their darndest to weed out such sites (and does a pretty good job of it, too). The “miserable failure” thing, however, came about as a result of a great many people, working separately (though, of course, with some coordination) to all put that phrase with that link on their otherwise separate web pages. This, then, does accurately reflect an opinion expressed on the Web, and it is therefore perfectly appropriate for Google to return the result it does.
If a product ranks higher on google because it just does, I’m going to trust that (quite literally) infinitely more than an advertisement for a product. An advertisement says absolutely nothing probative in relation to a buying decision other than that the product is available.