Network Solutions: Unethical SEO - A Closer Look at the Guarantee
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Network Solutions makes certain specific exceptions to its guarantee. It doesn't cover web sites that are all Flash, contain frames/layers or adult content. Web sites with downtime of more than a day void the guarantee; so do web sites that have been altered after NetSol has optimized them or that do not use 301 redirects.
Here's the specific text of the guarantee, taken from Network Solutions' web site: "For optimization packages ("To 10 Search Results service"), Network Solutions guarantees a minimum number of top 10 listings in one or more of 12 search engines within 10 months from completion date...Network Solutions will only submit keywords to search engines in the United States. The search engines included are: AOL, Alltheweb, AltaVista, Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves.com), Google, Hotbot, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!."
Does anyone want to make any guesses as to what percentage of search traffic Hotbot receives these days? Or Looksmart? It can't be very much. In early March, Hitwise reported the percentage of US searches among the leading search engine providers (remember, Network Solutions only submits keywords to search engines in the US). At that time, Google saw a little over 66 percent of this traffic. Yahoo saw close to 21 percent. MSN saw nearly seven percent. Ask was down to four percent. When you add up these figures, you get 98 percent.
What does this mean? By simple math, it means that the rest of the search engine market is wrestling over the remaining two percent of search traffic. So Network Solutions could get you top listings on Looksmart, Hotbot, and Lycos, where the link to your web site would see less than two percent of search traffic, and still have fulfilled its "guarantee." Maybe it isn't so unethical after all; that's not exactly much of a guarantee.
There is something else to note about NetSol's guarantee: "This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your web site." Additionally, there is no mention in Network Solutions' guarantee of how long your site will stay in the top 10 results. So in theory, the company could take 10 months to get your site listed in the top 10 search results on Lycos (for example) and if the listing stayed there for one month, it would have fulfilled its end of the contract - regardless of whether you received more traffic or conversions from the listing.
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