SEO Scams
SEO scams on the Internet abound as anyone who has been on
the receiving end can attest. SEO scams generally come in
three types including scams towards customers, scams towards
the search engines and scams towards other parties.
SEO Scams Towards Customers
In order to lure potential customers into buying their services,
some SEO will use deceptive practices. For instance, there
are some companies that proclaim "Get your website in
the number 1 position in Google in 24 hours" and then
lead the customer to believe this is some special SEO technique
that will get them at the top of the organic listings rather
than the AdWords pay-per-click listings.
Another SEO scam is luring customers into agreements by making
"too good to be true" statements about top rankings
and extremely short timeframes to see results in the organic
listings. By creating sky high unrealistic expectations, the
customer is destined to be sorely disappointed, time and again.
This is where an SEO Code of Ethics
statement can be useful so that the potential client knows
what the optimizer is willing to do and not do in order to
achieve higher search
engine rankings.
Some SEO's will also engage in risky linking behavior such
as paid linking that may temporarily inflate a page in the
SERPs, until the SEO has his money and then may quickly drop
in the rankings. It must be noted that not all paid linking
is risky or a scam, but customers should be informed when
there is risk to the web pages at stake.
SEO Scams Towards Search Engines
In the SEO world, there are white hats, black hats and gray
hats symbolizing good, bad and moderately underhanded. Black
hats and gray hats, to varying degrees, will try to scam the
search engines on behalf of their customers in order to achieve
higher search engine rankings. White hats do not use underhanded
methods.
The problem with black and gray hats is that they run the
potential of getting their client's websites penalized or
banned by search engines such as Google. So, this is not a
victimless crime at all.
The non white hats may use techniques such as invisible text,
cloaking, doorway pages and questionable redirects to artificially
inflate a web page in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
While some of these techniques may work for a while, eventually,
the search engines catch more of these techniques and penalize
or ban the website. The SEO scammer is most likely long gone
by this point with the customer's money.
SEO Scams Towards Other Parties
Some SEO's will try to trick parties other than their own
clients and the search engines for the benefit of their customers
(temporarily). For instance, an SEO may engage in a reciprocal
linking program on behalf of the client, then delete, orphan
or use and underhanded redirect on the links page to keep
this page from passing on Page Rank (PR) to the link partners,
thus inflating the client's page in the rankings.
Clients and non-clients can also sometimes be tricked into
participating in linking networks without clear knowledge
of what is actually going on and the risks involve. Sometimes
neither party will have any clue that anything is amiss until
another SEO with FTP access logs in and looks at the files
on the customer's website or another site.
These are just a few of the common SEO scams that have been
floating around for years. There are of course always many
new ones circulating. White hats (like our site) want to bring
this information to the public's attention because we believe
that black hats give the whole industry a black eye.
SEO scams mean potential customers come to us with a great
deal of initial mistrust by either being burned by an SEO
scam directly or fearing that they will be because they have
heard about one of more scams floating around at the moment.
This isn't good for us or the industry as a whole. We hope
that by exposing some of the SEO scams that people will know
what to look out for when considering hiring a search engine
optimizer for their website. And, the whole industry benefits
by having well-informed customers.
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