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Search Engine Ranking

The Fallacy of a Top Ten Promise

You may see a search engine marketing firm guaranteeing that they will give you a "top 10 ranking". This may sound impressive, but in fact it is so easy that anyone can do it, and it may not be worth anything to you.

You can demonstrate this to yourself using the following test:

Find a page on your website that is registered in Google, but ranks poorly. If you haven't got one, do a search on google and choose a link from the 3rd or 4th Google search page
Copy a string of text from that page consisting of up to 10 words (highlight the text and press CTL-C)
Go to the Google search page, then in the search box:
- Type a double quotation mark: "
- Paste the string of text (CTL-V)
- Type another double quotation mark
Click the button to search the internet
On the resulting search page, there will probably only be one page (the one you copied the text from), or if there are more pages, that page will be somewhere near the top.

This demonstrates that it is easy to get a top-10 ranking in a search engine. All you have to do is choose a very particular sequence of words on the page.

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