When I came to the Net for the first time with my site, in 1995, online business opportunities seemed to be close to zero, to me, a fellow newby with a budget of 50 bucks a month to spend in Internet promotion. Then, a friend of mine told me something about Yahoo! and search engines and I was very surprised to know that he wasn't talking about a new brand of motorcycle.....

I want you to know that I am the eternal curious. Just ask anyone who knows me. So, when that friend of mine explained to me that search engines were sites indexing and cataloguing other sites I decided to take a look.

It was very easy, at that time, to be indexed at the top of search engines for certain keywords and in a couple of weeks my new Internet site increased its traffic of 1000%. But the dream ended soon: after a couple of months, from one day to another, the traffic of my site decreased of 90% and I was at the starting point again; I decided to take a look at my listings within search engines and discovered that my site didn't rank well anymore; I loaded Yahoo! into my Mosaic browser and made a search for "search engines positioning secrets": BINGO! the first match was a site claiming to have a report about successful top positioning techniques and I bought it as soon as I read it (to get it, instead, was a matter of some days since the e-commerce was just an idea at that time...); the results were unbelievable: I got the first position for the keywords I chose with AltaVista and Lycos and the traffic of my site increased again of 2000%, this time; but after just one week it decreased to "ZERO". Doing a search on AltaVista and Lycos I noticed that my site wasn't listed anymore; so, I tried to resubmit it several times, but....no success! I contacted AltaVista and Lycos, both, telling them that I was upset because I was not able to submit my site and their answer was approx the following:

"Sorry, you have tried to repeteatly spam the index, so we have banned your site from our index." .........Spam ? what is spam?........... " Spamming is the alteration or creation of a document with intent to deceive an electronic catalog or filing system." - they replied to me

Yes! That "fantastic" report I had bought was just a "fantastic" set of spamming techniques created to subvert the search engine indexes. I apologized - I remember - through at least 10 emails in a one month period before to convince AltaVista and Lycos of my bona fide and to see my site in their database again. This was the thing that involved me into the knowledge of how search engines work and since then I put all my professional efforts in the learning of search engine positioning techniques without spamming.

Today the game of search engine positioning is even harder: search engines like Infoseek and HotBot have very strong and penalizing no-spam policies and this is the main reason because many people don't succeed in the search engine positioning war. The truth is that a correct approach by the honest side requires a bit of time and efforts in order to win the war, but it guarantees the success. The following are few suggestions I always send to my clients asking me for more information about how to succeed in the search engine positioning war; if you are thinking of buying top positioning services, reports or software or even if you have decided to play the game by yourself, following these simple suggestions you'll walk the right way to succeed:

   If you are trying to do all the hard work by yourself, don't copy high ranking pages from your competitors: they could be full of spamming techniques and you would risk to be banned together with your competitor' site.

   If you are considering to take advantage of a manual top positioning service, consider only those that are money back guarantee and make clear that you are not searching for any kind of top positioning success through spamming techniques.

   Before to submit to search engines a page created by you, read carefully their no-spam policies and check your pages to see if they are ok. Usually you may find no-spam policies into their help or add/URL section.

   If you have any doubt, contact search engines via email and ask if a page created by you could spam their index, if submitted: search engines will be happy to answer you and even they could give you some great tip on how to modify your page in order to rank a little better.

   If you look at a page, indexed by search engines, using spamming techniques to rank high, don't hesitate to report it to the related search engine: it is a right of yours and search engines appreciate it a lot.

Finally remember that top-positioning through the use of spamming techniques is a netiquette violation exactly like junk emails and also that even if you would be lucky enough not to be banned, the life of your top positioning will be shorter than that of top positioning achieved in an honest way.

Personally, I prefer to "stay on top 20" for one year with the same page, rather than "stay on top 10" for two months with a spamming page and then having to do all the hard work again. You will be amazed at how much better you will get and how far and fast your site will travel when you start to devote time each day to building your top positioning success in an honest way.