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The Biggest SEO Scam of All
by Cari Haus
While there are many ethical SEO firms
serving Internet users today, a few notorious practitioners also
exist. 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,” promised the telemarketer. I don’t
usually give telemarketers the time of day, but somehow found this
fellow to be intriguing. It was a cold and snowy day in Michigan
right at the moment, and somehow I felt warmer just 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 that really did have top rankings. At
first glance the sales spiel sounded rather inviting, but after
taking some time to consider and evaluate his company, I determined
that what this friendly young salesman offered was 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 service the 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 highly automated, 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, “if it sounds
too good to be true, it probably is.”
The above was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Upon further
questioning of my enthusiastic sales contact, I learned that it
wasn’t really my url that they wanted to promote. Their plan was
much more beneficial--for themselves, that is. They would set-up
urls to be doorway pages to my website. Their urls, not mine, would
be optimized to get high in the search engines. They would maintain
control of and ownership of the urls, so if I ever went out of
business, they could sell all that traffic—and value I had paid so
dearly for—to one of my competitors. Pretty nice deal for them. I
pay them big bucks on an annual basis to drive traffic to a url
which they—not me--own. Of course, I would benefit from whatever
sales 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” talked her into paying big bucks
for a website with a url which the SEO firm owned and controlled.
The SEO firm then 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 significant traffic my friend ever got was
garnered through pay-per-click. To make matters worse, the SEO firm
hid links 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 crowed about taking first place
for. To say the least, they were rather obscure. It’s a pretty
impressive accomplishment to come up first on the web for the search
term “furniture” or even “log furniture”. But if you design a page
that brings up your company first on Google for a search of
“Birmingham Tuscaloosa Avenue Dry Cleaners”, 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 final clincher 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 their clients 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—and better—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 of my 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.
Cari Haus has been successfully selling rustic log
furniture and beds on the Internet since 1997. Copyright 2005 by
Cari Haus, website http://www.logcabinrustics.com/. Permission is
granted to reprint this article, either online or in written
publications, as long as the copyright information, this paragraph,
and a link address or a link to the Log Cabin Rustics website is
attached at the end of the article.