1 Web Promotion: Insider Tips on How to Recognize the SEO Scams

By Rodney Brooks, on November 28th, 2009

Let’s first define SEO.

It is an acronym for ‘search engine optimization’.

You can save a lot of time and potentially improve your website by considering to hire an SEO company or a professional, but there are certain facts you need to be aware of.

Number one, You need to make sure to figure out the pros and cons as well as the damage that an un-professional SEO can do to your site.

1WebPromotion.com provides useful services for website owners, including:

Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development

Expertise in specific markets and geographies

Remember that the search results page at Google often includes paid advertising along with free organic search results.

Purchasing advertising spots with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s appearance in Google’s search results.

Google does not ask for money to include or rank sites in their search results, and it does not cost anything to get indexed in Google.

Free resources from Google, such as Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Central blog, and discussion groups can provide you with a terrific information on how to optimize your site for natural search results, but before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work.

I recommend starting here:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web

If you’re not very well versed in SEO, then it’s high time you realized that you need an SEO company to promote your website. And while SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a bad name through their overly aggressive and often ‘black-hat’ marketing techniques and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in questionable ways.

Practices that violate search engine guidelines may result in losing popularity or even getting banned from their index.

Here are some things to consider.

Beware of SEO firms and consultants that send you an email out of the blue.

Amazingly, even Google gets these spam emails: "Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…"

The #1 advice from Google says to stay away from SEOs that claim to guarantee #1 rankings, tells you about a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertises an ‘express submit’ to Google.

There is no paid or express submit for Google.

In fact, the only way is to go to Google directly and add your URL or submit a Sitemap.

Beware of companies that are secretive or won’t disclose what they do.

Get explanations if you have any questions.

If an SEO company uses ‘black-hat’ techniques like keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages, domain redirects etc., your site could be permanently damaged and removed from Google’s index. However, you will be responsible for any actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure to know how they intend to "help" you before you begin.

You should never have to link to an SEO website at all costs, do not fall for SEOs that tell you about the power of "free-for-all" links, link exchange schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are just scams and do not improve your results in any way.

Be sure to understand where the money goes. There are other scammers who will collect money from you and just buy top placements (paid advertising) on other websites. Understand that getting listed in the advertising section is totally different from appearing in the natural search results.

The most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter

One of most common scams is the creation of "shadow" domains that channel users to another site by using deceptive redirection scripts. These deceptive domains often will be owned and operated by the SEO company who claims to be working on your behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the company may redirect domain to a different domain, or even to a competitor’s site.

Another unethical practice is to use "doorway" pages stuffed with keywords on your site somewhere. The SEO convinces you that this will make the page more relevant for more queries.

This is totally false because individual pages are rarely relevant for a broad range of keywords. More dangerous, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such practices drain away the link popularity of your site and route it to the SEO and its clients, which may include sites with undesirable or illegal content.

Other things to look out for

Here are a few warnings to let you know that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any questions, you should trust your instincts.

By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

Owns or operates shadow domains
Creates or stuffs links on doorway pages
Offers to sell keywords in the address bar
Doesn’t distinguish between organic and paid search results
Guarantees top ranking, but only on obscure, unwanted keywords
Asks your financial login details, credit card numbers etc.
Operates with multiple names or unknown WHOIS info
Gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
Has had domains removed from Google’s index
Requests your FTP account or root access to your server

The Experts at 1WebPromotion.com are capable of handling your SEO and website promotion using completely ‘white-hat’ tactics that the search engine love. They will never use any ‘unethical’ means to deceive the search engines. They are top experts and they know what they are doing..

If you own a website, then you MUST market your website to Search Engines. Go to 1webpromotion.com to see how you can get this done for free by leading "search engine marketing" and "optimization" experts.