The Biggest SEO Scam Of All

While there are many ethical SEO firms serving Internet users today, a few notorious practitioners alsoexist. One of them called me just the other day.

"We can get your site to be number one in the search engines for the top 20 search terms you choose," promisedthe telemarketer. I don't usually give telemarketers the time of day, but somehow found this fellow tobe intriguing. It was a cold and snowy day in Michigan right at the moment, and somehow I felt warmerjust hearing him glow about the sunshine beaming through his own office windows.

"Show me results," I requested. So we cruised the web together, and he showed me some client sites thatreally did have top rankings. At first glance the sales spiel sounded rather inviting, but after takingsome time to consider and evaluate his company, I determined that what this friendly young salesman offeredwas nothing more than a scam.

As I did my homework, several red flags jumped out at me. By researching his company on the Internet,I learned that they employed no less than 250 telemarketers soliciting SEO clients on a continual basis.With all due respect to the size of this company, I found it hard to believe that they could servicethe numerous SEO clients they were recruiting in a very meaningful way.

I asked the salesman about this the next time he called. He informed me that their SEO service was highlyautomated, built on proprietary technology that was so ahead of its time that no other firm could compete.In case you didn't catch it, the previous sentence contained red flag #2. In the words of the old adage, "ifit sounds too good to be true, it probably it."

The above was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Upon further questioning of my enthusiastic salescontact, I learned that it wasn't really my url that they wanted to promote. Their plan was much morebeneficial--for themselves, that is. They would set-up urls to be doorway pages to my website. Theirurls, not mine, would be optimized to get high in the search engines. They would maintain control ofand ownership of the urls, so if I ever went out of business, they could sell all that traffic-and valueI had paid so dearly for-to one of my competitors. Pretty nice deal for them. I pay them big bucks onan annual basis to drive traffic to a url which they-not me--own. Of course, I would benefit from whateversales came through their url as long as I continued to ante up cash.

I had a good friend who fell prey to this scheme a few years back. An unscrupulous SEO "specialist" talkedher into paying big bucks for a website with a url which the SEO firm owned and controlled. The SEO firmthen billed my friend much more than they had originally contracted for. When she balked at the bill,they threatened to shut down traffic to the site.

While this firm also promised hordes of traffic and top search engine listings, the only significanttraffic my friend ever got was garnered through pay-per-click. To make matters worse, the SEO firm hidlinks to their sites throughout the html of her website.

Another fault I found with the SEO firm mentioned first in this article was the search terms they crowedabout taking first place for. To say the least, they were rather obscure. It's a pretty impressive accomplishmentto come up first on the web for the search term "furniture" or even "log furniture". But if you designa page that brings up your company first on Google for a search of "Birmingham Tuscaloosa Avenue DryCleaners", big deal. And that's what this SEO firm was doing.

Although I never seriously considered dropping $3000 or whatever it was for their services, the finalclincher came when I asked what type of traffic I could expect for digging into my pockets.

"I can get you an average of 100 hits per day," he told me. Then he showed me stats on some of theirclients sites that had, over the course of a year, built up to 100 hits per day. I don't know about you,but I want a lot more than 100 unique hits per day on my website. I've achieved those kinds of numbers-andbetter-by myself. Why should I pay them for what I consider to be mediocre results?

Don't get me wrong. I do believe in SEO firms, and because of the success I've been having on some ofmy top search terms, may engage in that business myself someday. But after researching the issues carefully,I would warn fellow webmasters to beware of any SEO firm that:

employs a boiler room full of telemarketers
automates most or all of their services
insists on gaining and retaining control of the url to be promoted
focuses on lengthy and obscure search strings
touts sites that are garnering a mere 100 hits per day as examples of their success.

Of all the bad practices mentioned above, the one I found most offensive was the idea that the SEO firm should own or control my url. While owning the url would seem like a good idea for the SEO firm (they could always collect their fees by threatening to shut down the site), it isn't so nifty for the client. If I pay a firm to build my business, I want them to do just that-build my business. To pay a firm to build traffic to a url they own is really like paying them to build their business-and that, in my opinion, is the biggest SEO scam of all.

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