Search Engine Trust
About a year ago, I found a AdWord ad while reading an SEO blog. The ad was promoting a service which promised to get unlimited amount of back-links to their customers’ sites for a fixed low rate. I decided to check it out. I read the marketing blah blah on their front page (I believe back then it was on searchenginetrust.com later moved to getsearchenginetrust.com). The service was called Search Engine Trust (SET) operating by Nicolas Messe of Yoffi Internet Marketing.
The deal offered about 100 blogs running on WordPressMU. Each site was hosted on separate c-class IP addresses. Each member got a user name and password to the system where they were allowed to post a short blurb including a single link to site the member was promoting. SET regulations controlled that only one link was allowed per post and that each post had to be relevant to the content of the donor (linking) blog site. These regulations were strictly enforced by SET staff which kept the system clean of spam posts and made sure that the overall content on the blogs were relevant which helped the sites to get higher ranking on search engines, especially the high Google PageRank which made this whole thing so exciting. I became a member just to see how the system worked and tested it on some of my “test sites” which I was running to study search engine crawling and ranking technologies our current top search engines used. This and designing my own search engines allowed me to become a better SEO.
At the beginning, everything seemed to be working just as planned. I was lucky enough to lock down my startup membership fee of US$157 for being a “loyal SET member”. The number of blogs on the list was growing! Some sites got removed, but lots of higher PR sites got added on a monthly basis. I really liked the system so much that I even used some of the highest ranked sites (and there were some nice PR5-7 sites, even a PR8 site!) to help my customers’ off-bran sites, by sending them some relevant link juice. But we all know that nothing last forever, right? I guess Mr. Messe started making too much money or not enough? I was speculating, “Hmm maybe the company got sold?” Either way, the quality of the service started going down fast: Customer service stopped responding to support tickets, no more new sites were added to the list and worst of members started posting pointless/non-relevant articles with multiple links included to non-relevant sites which made most of these high ranked blogs go down fast. Most of them got banned in Google very fast which made our links in the previously submitted posts worthless or even dangerous. I was still doing my very best to post on those SET blogs according to their regulations, but a few days ago when I noticed that all the sites were down, I decided to cancel my PayPal subscription and write this post just to let it out of my system. 
As the system was dying, I was so disappointed with the poor quality of the service I even sent direct emails to Mr. Messe, but he has never replied. His site (nicolasmesse.com) is now offering a new type of SEO service he is still developing. On his site he offered SEO’s to sign up for his new service. From the list he would pick the best ones. I signed up too, but no response. Maybe according to him I’m not a good enough SEO… His new “mastermind program” is called Everlasting (sometimes also called “Everylasting”). This is not a personal attack against Mr. Messe. I apologize if it seems like it. I’m just expressing my frustration. I am really sorry that SET didn’t work out, because I think it was a great idea. I’m sure he had his reasons to let it go.
Anyone interested in building a similar system? (Now that we would not have to compete with SET)
Tags: engine, link building, link juice, search, SET, trust