can popunders hurt your ranking?

[eMEraLdwPn]

i hired two people to help me redesign and promote some of my sites. they contacted me telling me what they were going to do, and said that i would have to remove the pop-unders from one of my sites or i wouldn't achieve a high ranking. seeing as how i earn about 50% of my revenue from pop-unders, which only display one per user per 12 hours, and the amount of sites that utilize an exorbitant amount of popups on the internet, this doesn't seem very logical to me. this is what they said:


Once the engine sees a growth in rank they start checking out your site. Once its reviewed by hand (especially GOOGLE) when they see Pop unders they will lower the sites relevance. Lowering it's stats, lowering it's rank. They can even get you banned. Basically we will build the rank and they will knock it down. It will be a battle but we will build it as we promise. Longevity of rank with pops of any kind are limited. Just want to be clear on that.
does anyone know if there is any truth to this?

[Shawn]

Ask them if they were drinking when they e-mailed you that.

[incka]

Ask them if they are lost in the depths of webmaster world and have fallen under the spell of believing everything posted there.

[tomek]

> Once its reviewed by hand (especially GOOGLE)

lol

[Chris]

This was a myth from my Google myths article.

In truth Google has a policy against pops, for adwords advertisers. They have repeatedly stated (and experience shows) that no such policy exists for general search results.

[Emancipator]

all i can do is shake my head and wonder how much you are paying them. They need to at least learn the google basics before they start trying to do any SEO work.

[Mike]

There really are some dodgy seo companies.

[incka]

The only good ones seem to be SEO Guy and Advantage Consulting Services (which I would not recommend write a website for you as theirs is full of spelling errors, like my posts, but worse).

[eMEraLdwPn]

yeah, that's what i thought..
it's not an SEO company, it's these two guys that my friend works with / has used before and said they did a really good job. he worked out a really good deal for me, etc... anyway the guy who sent me that is behind the redesign, not the seo, so hopefully the other guy knows what he's doing

now i have to tell this guy that he has no idea what he's talking about as politely as possible.... :P

[Emancipator]

99% of companies are dodgy. I have been doing my own seo for years and have had many "pros" offer to screw up, err i mean IMPROVE my rankings :)

My suggestion is do some reading.. and ask lots of questions and save your money.

[Kyle]

The best is when you get into debates with these kind of people. I usually get 3-5 calls a month from people offering search engine ranking services.

I did get a call from the jackass at Traffic Power once. That was exciting.