Webmasters: Is Trusted Feed Worth It?

In My Humble Opinion
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      • A company I am sort-of consulting for is interested in paying for search-engine placement, via “trusted feed”. The company offering this service claims to be able to get most pages ranked in the first or second page of any major search engine, and also allows various statistical keyword analysis services and allows choosing the summary text that shows up in the search engine listing.
        …
        Anybody done this before? Do these services generally deliver what they promise, and does it help much? I am having trouble turning up any customer comments on any of these businesses. Every link I try either runs straight to a comments page on the company’s own site, or to the website of a competitor…
        ~
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I’d be wary of these. They may be able to do what they claim, but it’s the means by which they do it that you should be careful of.

For example:
One popular way (until recently) of boosting Google rankings was the creation of “link farms.” As you may know, Google takes the number of pages that links to yours into consideration when generating your site’s rank. Link farms were sites that, AFAIK, had nothing but links to sites of subscribers, and these “rank boosting” companies had tons of 'em.

Once Google found out what they were doing, however, they penalized farm users with a fairly severe (as I understand it) penalty to their ranking. I forget how bad it was, but one company thus penalized thinks it’s serious enough to sue Google over on the grounds that they’re losing income because of it. (Boohoo.)

Just my $0.02.