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Separating the
legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) companies from
the fly-by-night companies can be a daunting task. With
a little investigative legwork, you should be able to avoid
most pitfalls. Below is a list of the common scams and tips
on how to check out the companies offering the hooks.
Guaranteed
Rankings
Guarantees by
themselves are not bad as many legitimate SEO companies
offer some sort of guarantee on their services. What to
watch out for are the guarantees that offer pie-in-the-sky
results (such as rank number 1 in Google in 2 weeks) or
guarantees that are so watered down that they are meaningless.
Expectations of results for new, uneducated customers are
usually unrealistic in the SEO world, so customers need
to be educated as to what they should realistically expect.
Some illegitimate
SEO companies will play off of these "drive-up window"
expectations and promise unrealistic timeframes for results.
Later, these companies will balk at giving refunds, offer
you other services for more money in place of refunds, become
unreachable by mail, email or phone or disappear altogether.
A couple of
methods of checking out SEO companies is to check with the
Better Business Bureau to see if any claims have been filed
against your company and also checking with Whois tools
(through Network Solutions or another provider) to find
out who the registered owner, administrative contact and
technical contacts are and if these contacts look legitimate.
Legitimate companies will not try to hide anything, so if
the Whois info looks suspicious, then buyer beware.
SEO Email
Spam
"We've
noticed that you are not listed in some search engines"
the email begins. This is Spam that even Bill Gates receives.
The best way to find an SEO company is to search the major
search engines you wish to be listed upon for them and not
let them come to you. After all if an SEO company can get
their sites high in the search engine rankings, chances
are they can do the same for you.
Get 1000's
Of Links To Your Site Automatically
In early days
it would have helped a website if you were listed on link
farms or FFA (Free-For-All) sites, but now this will get
your website penalized by most search engines. So, not only
will a company take your money to put a link back to your
site on 1000's of unrelated sites, but your search engine
rankings will suffer for this as well. Just say no to this
service. Instead practice reciprocal linking with legitimate,
related websites and you will fare much better in the search
engine rankings.
Get Listed
On Thousands Of Search Engines
First, thousands
of the lesser, if not questionable search engines will not
bring much business to your site. Your focus needed to be
on the major search engines and directories (Google, Yahoo,
DMOZ, MSN, etc.). Second, being listed on thousands of search
engines is not the same as being ranked highly on thousands
of search engines. Very simply put, the company will take
your money, use a piece of software to broadcast your URL
to thousands of small search engines and the traffic you
will receive in return will most likely be minimal to none.
It is much better to avoid this altogether and hand-submit
your URL to the major search engines and directories.
Cloaking
Cloaking is
an unethical technique used by some shady SEO companies
to serve up one page of highly optimized text to the search
engines and a different page to your visitors. While not
a scam in the same sense of the other scams (since you may
see some good results for a while), but it is problematic
since, over time, more than likely your site will be caught
by the search engines and your IP address and domain name
will be banned. So the effect is that you will be engaging
in unethical activity, you will pay money for this, and
your site will suffer by being dropped from the search engines.
One way to be aware of this is watching for other files
your SEO company may be placing on your site or stating
upfront with your SEO company that you do not want cloaking
used on your site.
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