This is a guest post from Josh Garner, a practicing SEO professional. He’ll be sharing some of the things small business owners and the self-employed should be wary of when looking to hire an SEO.
As an Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), my job is to make use of a number of methods in order to help a site rank higher in the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.).
I’ll save you some of the boring parts, but SEO is a pretty important aspect of any serious business venture with an online component. However, my business is also a pretty strange one. It requires a lot of experience, research, and patience to effectively get a website to rank highly. Because of this, a lot of what I do is still a mystery, even to clients I’ve had for over a year.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of “SEOs” out there taking advantage of the unknowing site owner, leaving a bad taste in their mouth about what SEO is and how it can help. With this post, I would like to give you a few signs that someone is trying to rip you off. These are seven signs of SEO scams.
1. We can rank your site in 48 hours!
Boy, I wish this was possible. It sure would save me a whole lot of time slaving over my computer like a maniac, pouring over search term trends, conversion reports, traffic and ranking reports, etc. I wouldn’t be spending hours on end modifying and optimizing content until my SEO fingers bleed. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. It takes hours to find the right search terms. Depending on the size of a website, it can take days to implement changes. It takes weeks to see the initial effects. It can take months to get things going in the right direction. If you’re being promised results in a few days, your being offered a money pit and little more.
2. We sill submit your site to 1,000 Search Engines!
Put aside the fact that I’ve been doing this job for years, and I can only name about 10 search-engines without cheating. Instead, consider the fact that I haven’t submitted a site (personally or professionally) to a search engine in over three years now. Even the guidelines of the search engines themselves tell you it doesn’t really do anything for you anymore. The major search engines have also been in this business for years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at finding sites themselves. No need to submit, let alone pay someone to do so.
3. We will get thousands of links to your site!
This claim is usually paired with an incredible time frame, but the sheer number of links promised alone is beyond amazing. First, it’s not the number of links coming to your site that makes a difference. It’s the number of QUALITY links. Second, where are all of these links coming from? Probably what’s known as a link farm: a large number of websites set up in order to link one site. The search engines don’t normally appreciate this practice, and it can lead to penalties. Third, it’s more likely a straight out lie. Even scammers don’t waste their time with link farms. It takes too much more time to set all that up than it does to just take your money and disappear.
4. Have your site optimized and promoted for only $71.95 a month!
In my first point, I hinted at the amount of time and work I put into a single website. Not only making the changes, but keeping up with the site’s progress, promoting it through links and thinking of ways to drive traffic to the site. Consider the countless hours I’ve spent learning what it takes to rank a site. Consider also the returns a proper SEO campaign offers a site. Ranking well for a competitive search term can yield some pretty nice rewards. Think we would do this for $79.95 a month? Not to sound crass, but I wouldn’t even open my laptop for that much money. If you’re serious about your site’s success, expect to spend no less than a few thousand dollars, and that’s low end. There are some SEOs that charge $1000 an hour for consulting, and they are worth every penny.
5. We can’t tell you what we are doing: it’s a trade secret.
Other than a few tid bits you find after years of doing this kind of work, there really isn’t a whole lot of “secret” information. We aren’t paid because we have some incredible secret wrapped up. We are paid because of the experience we have in dealing with the search engines, and the success we can bring to the site’s table. If someone makes this claim, they either don’t want you to know how poor the service is, or they have no idea what they are doing.
6. We know a guy at Google.
I love this one. Mostly because I know a guy at Google. I also know a guy at Nissan, but I still make monthly payments. I know a guy at Sprint, and I still pay a monthly bill. I know a guy…well…you get it. Think of the search engine ranking factors as the closely guarded secret formula for Coke. You have to get pretty close to the code to have even a clue about what goes into it. The guys and gals that do know for sure what the factors are also fully understand the legal implications of giving away such secrets to some guy charging you $79.95 a month to rank your site in 48 hours (like how I tied all those into that one?).
7. We guarantee page 1 rankings!
Nobody can do this. Nobody. In SEO, there are no guarantees on rankings, traffic, or any other measure. Think of SEO like advertising (that’s really all it is, just online). The best marketing guys don’t guarantee anything either. Neither do doctors or lawyers. You hire these professionals based on the questions you’ve asked them, their past successes, experience, etc. SEO is no different. Good SEOs are good SEOs because they have spent years learning and testing, and know of the measures most often needed to produce results. So if anyone guarantees anything, they are only guaranteeing that you will be wasting your hard earned money.
Bonus
So how do you find a good SEO? Well, leave some comments on what you think about this post, and let Skellie know you would like to hear more. If so desired, and accepted by Skellie, I’ll return with a post answering that question.
About Josh Garner
Josh is an SEO from Jacksonville, FL who has been involved in the SEO industry for more than 4 years, and offers his services to small and medium sized businesses on a freelance basis.
Photo by Keith Bacongco.
44 Responses
Good myth debunking!
A lot of the SEO info I come across is out of context or misleading. I think part of the problem is the delay in feedback (for example one of my blogs PR didn’t jump until the following week and my meta-description didn’t show up in search results until a few days later after the change … so I kept reverting changes and tests not realizing there was a delay.)
Another part of my initial confusion was I didn’t think in terms of optimizing for eyeballs (guest posts, forums, blog comments) or optimizing for link juice/links/linkerati (do follows, permanent links, … etc.)
Key questions for you:
1. what do you think is the most effective technique for bloggers to improve their SEO? (Besides the blog url, page title, meta-description and h1s)
2. In your experience, how important is using an H1 tag vs. bolding for headings? (for example, I made the mistakes of wrapping my headings in bold instead of using H1s and changing the css)
I know this guy at google… honestly I can’t imagine most people would believe a lot of those promises that some people make.
Is most of what you know from trial and error? What are some good SEO resources out there?
It is very true that there are scams like these everywhere claiming all sorts of things they cannot deliver. Totally wasting time.
Great article
Ahh this is really a nice post. Especially for me. I always get this kind of offer but frankly I don’t buy something I don’t understand what’s the use of it. Lots of offer being make to me about ranking my site’s to top 10 at the big G. I wonder is that really possible. Even it is how long would it stay that way?…
Useful points, and thanks to posts like these, at least blog-reading webmasters realize scams a bit.
Must-read: Matt Cutts’ exposing of an email by an SEO - it certainly is hilarious
@J.D Meier: Hmm….I think there’s a large number of bloggers who are not aware of good SEO practices, with regards to on-page optimization.
I may write a guest post on that, on Problogger, DailyBlogTips or Skelliewag. Stay tuned !
A comment on #3: I guess the number of search engines worldwide is much closer to 1000 than to 10. You only consider the US ones. All the 990 others wouldn’t be of much use for a website in English, and I doubt that the SEO dudes you refer to would be able to submit anything to the Scandinavian or Chinese search engines, but I had to mention it as Anywired is about working online from anywhere in the world.
A friend of mine is in an SEO program, and one of the big wigs had a guy come up to him at a conference and brag about the shadiest thing I’ve ever heard of:
He wrote a program that auto-propagated these link pages to rank his product pages. Google figures it out and gives him a nice slap.
So he sets up a fake SEO business with a website and prepaid cell phones and everything. Contacts his competitors and offers services for free, he just wants a percentage of the improvement. Everyone likes free stuff so they give him access to their sites.
He runs his shady program again, google slaps them. When they try to call to find out what the hell happened those phones are disconnected and the site is down. He’s disappeared off the planet, and all his competition has to start over building up their web rankings. Something he’s been doing the whole time he’s been running this scam.
So beware the word ‘free’, and don’t give access to your site to anyone you wouldn’t give your car keys to.
Hate to nitpick, but there are a few typos in there. “Your being offered…” instead of “you’re being offered” etc.
Just saying
Josh,
Thanks for this great post. As a designer and little bit developer SEO is just something I try and stay knowledgable about. This is a great lesson on what really can be done.
I vote you come back for that next post.
Great article Josh,
It always bugs me when people promise these things. Or worse yet, when companies EXPECT these things because they’ve been exposed to these kind of scams in the past and believe them to be possible.
What really irks me about these SEO promises is that then people think these kinds of results are achievable. And they want to know why your well-composed yet keyword rich articles haven’t made Google’s #1 spot for any of the keywords on their month old blog. Or they ask you up front if you can do any of these things and go elsewhere when you say “Honestly, no. They’re not realistic.” Kind of like the people who want to make a million dollars a year blogging.
Thanks for the post and please tell us more. I’d love to know what those of us semi-pros on limited budgets can do.
Have you ever thought about an affordable one time consultation offering a few tweaks and suggesting SEO strategies for the future for example?
Keep it comin’ And thanks Skellie…I missed you this last couple ‘o weeks.
These scams are particularly annoying to anyone who has taken the time to study SEO.
I completed a fairly exhaustive SEO/SEM course last year. Now, whenever I get one of these scam Emails I feel like reporting them to someone. But of course there is no one policing this.
Getting the word out is a good thing then. Don’t fall for these impossible promises. Either take the onus on yourself to learn what you need, or hire qualified people.
I just had #5 issue. I saw a store of PRXXXXX and walked in because I thought it was unusual for a PR company to have retail store in consumer oriented shopping strip. I explained that I have a blog for my business, do what little I know about SEO (mostly about using All In One SEO plugin. . . ), and would be interested if theyd tell me what they can do to improve the ranking, or what I am doing wrong currently — just so I have an idea what I’d be paying for.
She said it was trade secret, but after a little while agreed she would have her techs to take a look of my site and get back to me.
Their answer? They think I am doing fine onsite, and they can do more off site improvement, of course never telling me WHAT they’d do for me off site. . . .
Great post, reminds me of a page I had on my blog while I was still full time employed at an agency. It was basically a place holder for when I left to become a freelancer.
SEO is still a very young industry and the scams will slowly die down as the service offering matures and consumers (businesses) are more aware of how it works. I always mention in my client meetings what SEO is and what SEO is not to alleviate the misconceptions they may have and create realistic expectations.
Anyone who wants SEO Blogging advice feel free to shoot me a note with your questions. I will write up a nice post on some of the things I discovered over the years working with Wordpress as part of my 30 sites in 90 days challenge.
Maybe a #8 could be, “Buy this tool to automatically generate top ranking keywords for your site”. The web is full of offers for this tool, that tool, which can “automatically improve your search engine rankings”. There are certainly tools around that can assist an SEO in gathering and analysing data but there is just no substitute for experience.
This is a great post Josh. I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on how people should select an SEO so I hope Skellie brings you back
Is there a good book that SEO pros would recommend? Any you would avoid?
Great information, as a web designer myself, I see multiple instences where my customers are trying to use or are already using “Packages” of hosting and “SEO” for 70-100 a month, and they only really get their meta tags updated and submited to search engines. The average small business owner just dosen’t understand untill it is really explained to them.
Thank you to everyone for all the kind comments. I really appreciate it.
I’ll see if I can answer some of the questions.
@J.D. Meier
1. The single most effective technique bloggers can do to improve their rankings and traffic is the creation of quality content. As for the SEO side, in addition to the things you mentioned, good title tags (unique for every page) and the correction of any canonicalization issues. This is a fancy word for duplicate content issues with pages having both the http://www. and non http://www. form, etc.
2. H1 tags are important in my experience, but when used in context. I wrote a small post about it here: http://www.seo-factor.com/header-tags-and-seo. Again it’s in context, so if your bolds looked good and functioned, then there’s no need to make a change.
@Cody Robert
Most of what I know is indeed from trial and error. There are a ton of great resources out there. I’ll go ahead and start adding them to my Universal Netvibes account. There are the things I read. After a while, there’s a little intuition involved.
@Bagrep
Amen.
@Alex
Thank you very much.
@exfatguy
It is indeed possible. And there are indeed ways to keep it that way. I don’t mean to sound so mysterious, but there’s a lot to it. In the end, create quality. Then, when optimizing, ask yourself if Google would approve of your actions (at least that’s the safest way).
@Hansson
You can indeed submit to international search engines. But even abroad there’s still a Google. There’s Baidu in China, but generally speaking 1,000 is just silly. In reality, there really is no need to submit to anything anymore except for places like Mahalo (I may catch flack for that). The search engines are more than capable of finding your site without your submission these days. Just get a few decent links pointing to it and you’re good to go on that part.
@FatB
That’s horrible. That’s exactly the type of stuff that makes us look bad. Sigh…
@Sumesh from Blog Creativity
Lol…oops. If I could change it I would. Think my writing is bad? You should see me try to design something.
@brad
Thank you very much. We’ll see what Skellie says.
@Mrs. Micah
You hit the magic word. Time. It all takes time. A one-month old site simply isn’t going to boom.
Thank you again to everyone that commented. If there’s anything else I can answer, please feel free to let me know. And a big giant Thank You to Skellie for letting me spread my words. This is a great blog in an effort to show others the path to more freedom.
Sorry. For those of you that want to read some of the things I do in regard to SEO, I’ll be adding them here throughout the day.
http://www.netvibes.com/seofactor#General
Its about time someone pointed out these SEO scammers! Since internet marketing is a booming business, these SEO scammers have been popping out from nowhere in the hordes! Many of them claim they can get you listen in 200, 500 or even 1000 search engine! Idiots i say!
@Bruce Houghton / Hypebot.com I do indeed offer consulting and custom SEO services. http://www.seo-factor.com/custom-seo-consulting
Really great post =D I especially liked no. 6. Hahaha! Maybe you should create another post regarding reputable SEO services instead.
I don’t believe in all these. No such thing in the world unless it is a scam, purely exist to con people..
I published a post about a SEO of my city, here in Modena.
I partially translated this article for any italian person that is interested about it.
The url is: http://www.dav-muz.net/2008/05/nessuno-pu-garantire-il-tuo-sito-sulla.html
Thank you for your article, this help me to give awareness to my readers.
this is a really good way to weed out all those scam SEO companies. Sometimes their claims are just too good to be true.
So how do we know which are legit?
Hey! I read your tutorial and found it very usefull…, so I took the liberty to translate it into Spanish, to share it with my colleagues. You can check it out at http://www.summarg.com.ar/showthread.php?t=1600, Cheers!
thx for reveal so many scams tactic….
Another funny one promised to double traffic to a site that I work with. Then goes on to specify that there are no guarantees. What a joke. Not like doubling traffic is going from 100 to 200 unique browsers…more like going from over 500,000 uniques to over 1million.
See @LOANS comment for a great example of #3. I hope no one payed for that spam, er, I mean link.
RE: #6 - I really used to know a guy on the inside of Yahoo that would help me get questions answered when no one else would answer me. This is before we had guru’s like Matt Cutts blogging (I really am OldSchool). It wasn’t a part of my sales presentation however.
This article nails it perfectly! Thank you sooooo much for sharing your insights.
I especially like the one about trade secrets. I teach SEO at the Search Engine Academy of Oregon and I do SEO for clients as well. Therefore I believe in complete transparency in what I do for my clients and my students.
I teach my clients about SEO so they can make informed decisions.
I love this article!
Thank you
Colleen Wright
Search Engine Academy of Oregon
http://www.sea-oregon.com
Bwah, that last one’s hilarious.
1. I have page one rankings if you Google my name, but I’m the only person on Earth with this combination of first and last name. The. only. That’s it.
2. A few years back I got page one rankings on a CafePress shop I was running. And I have no idea why. But I sure wasn’t complaining.
Page one is no big deal. Attaining page one if you don’t have a unique set of keywords on your site, or maintaining it while you have it… those are the big deals. If someone from my family names their daughter after me and she becomes Web-savvy someday, I wouldn’t even keep my name’s page one rankings. *shrug*
Well, dang! Just when I learnt’ how to spell algorithm, you went and spoiled my money maker! (Great stuff here, kudos!)
Nice article : We know a guy at Google
… at Yahoo and Microsoft too 
4front417,
Try Enquiro for a professional SEO service. They not only keep pace with the general field but they break new ground in research. Check them out.
PS: I’m not affiliated with them at all. I just happen to know them well enough.
Cheers,
John
I cannot believe what is going on out there! So many people are being preyed upon because of their lack of knowledge.
SEO requires lots and lots of quality content writing. And it is not cheap to create this quality content.
It requires time and research. I refuse to take on any new client unless they truly understand this process.
We guarantee page 1 rankings! — > This is practically nonsense. If they can guarantee that, then SEO industry would like collapse long ago.
Hello,
It’s not terribly off topic, but…
I’m hoping to begin a career in SEO and I’m afraid my entry-level status will leave me vunerable to being taken advantage of. How on earth do I start a career?
I enjoy MythBusters on TV and I enjoyed this post. It’s a good reference for all the newbies I meet who claim that they know this SEO expert who will deliver on the above promises.
The points stressed here are pretty much elementary in scope and require only common sense and discretion on part of the individual buyer of SEO services.
I do have a problem with #7 though; the warning could be worded differently. Case in point is that we do offer a guarantee to our clients.
While of course no person can give absolute assurances of ranking, we guarantee that if Page #1 positions are not achieved, no payment is due from the client, at all.
This guarantees that the client gets what they pay for, and provides incentive for us to work harder to create premium content and optimize pages which are rewarded with better positions in the search engines.
We have a similar warning page on our website for SEO scams to avoid. Here’s the URL if you’d care to look: http://www.thevisibledentist.com/avoid.php
John Barremore
Houston, TX
http://www.thevisibledentist.com
We offer page #1 positions for our client’s most competitive keyword phrases. Our performance guarantee states that rankings will be attained BEFORE any payment is due.
Often in addition to dozens of 1st page placements for primary terms, the client’s website will also attain hundreds of long-tail 1st page positions as an extra side benefit.
To be sure, no one can absolutely guarantee ANY search engine positions, however, you CAN guarantee rankings will be achieved in advance of any payment.
John Barremore
Houston, TX
Great Article, Any good SEO’s you can reccomend? Or maybe sites that list the ones with complaints?