Sudden appearance of #1 ranking

[bmegowan]

Has anyone noticed a new website suddenly appearing out of nowhere for a keyword search as #1 on MSN.com. I have had two instances in the last month where a website with almost no unique content or backlinks suddenly appear as the #1 listing for a key word search, and as soon as I sent an email to MSN search about this, the website was off the rankings the next day. I have been getting a lot of emails from companies that say they have proprietary software to get youa #1 search engine listing for certain key words and have ignored them. Do some companies actually have a way to get their clients in #1 position in a natural search without going through all the hard work everyone elso goes through?

[HHI Golf Guy]

Do some companies actually have a way to get their clients in #1 position in a natural search without going through all the hard work everyone elso goes through?

Here's how some companies can guarantee the #1 spot:

1. They are speaking about PPC and not organic listings.
2. They choose the keywords - usually long, obscure, and almost irrelevant phrases. In other words, no one searches for them.

The other day another SEO company called a client of mine and told them that they could improve their search engine rankings. Keep in mind that my client is already top 5 on the Big 3 SE's for all of ther major keywords - each with over 10 million competing pages. My client asked me to check them out, and sure enough most of their clients had #1 rankings. Too bad that for almost all of these phrases their were less than 1,000 competing pages!

There are no shortcuts in organic SEO - even with cloaking. For competitive KW's it usually takes 6 months for an existing site to gain top rankings, and a year or more for new sites.

[BajaGeoff]

Golf Guy is right on. There is no substitute for building good content, a user friendly site, optimizing your pages and working on getting quality inbound links. Shortcuts and "quick ranking" schemes are just that.....schemes. Put in the time and effort to do it right and you will see results.

I have seen MSN results bouncing around quite a bit. Not sure why but it seems like they are re-indexing the search results a lot more often than google or yahoo. That might have a lot to do with it.