Top 5 Claims Made by SEO Spammers

At the beginning of the week, I came across a rather compelling article from Danny Sullivan that discussed the recent criticism made against the search engine optimization industry by prominent writers such as Gene Marks from Business Week. As a search engine optimization specialist, it bothers me that SEO as an industry is still widely misunderstood. Many small business owners who lack the knowledge in SEO and web technologies, and are working on small budgets can fall prey to these SEO spammers who are looking for a quick buck.

Here’s the top 5 claims made by SEO spammers:

1. Top 10 Search Engine Placements for $19.95/month – Search engine optimization companies that promise “fully-automated technologies” creating “full websites that have thousands of pages” for only $19.95 a month are not offering an SEO solution, they’re selling spam. They might claim these “content-driven” sites are search engine friendly; however, more than likely they’re scrapping content off other websites and creating reconstituted spam.
2. We have “special” relationships with the search engines – No matter what these SEO spammers say to you, they do not have special relationships with the search engines. They can’t get your pages indexed any faster than Joe SEO down the street. They don’t have the inside scoop on Google’s algorithm.
3. You don’t have to change your website.We host the domains and create the websites that we submit for you. – This spammer’s statement really scared me. So for a fee, they create microsites which YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER using your company’s brand, and spam them over the search engines. Even if they generate traffic that converts, the minute you stop paying the spammer, the traffic dries up, because the spammer just changes the DNS and points that traffic elsewhere.
4. We’ll submit your site to thousands of search engines and directories, getting your websites all over the World Wide Web. – Search engine optimization isn’t about getting your site into “thousands” of search engines and directories. Most companies only need to worry about the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. All three search engines actively crawl the internet looking for new content, so you don’t have to submit your site to them, just employ some good link building techniques to be where the search engines are crawling.
5. We guarantee our search engine placement results! – Most business owners want a guarantee on their investment, especially when it’s on something they completely don’t understand. However, in search engine optimization there are no guarantees no matter what the SEO spammers say, because in the end, it’s the search engines, and not SEOs that decide what’s relevant and should have top search engine placements. The only guarantee I’ll give you is that there’s some loophole in the contract that let’s the spammer out of his “guarantee”.

So don’t be fooled folks! Search engine optimization requires one of two things: time or money. Either you have time get search engine optimization training and implement these strategies yourself or you have the money to pay a professional SEO to do the work for you. And I “guarantee” it’s going to cost more than $19.95/month to get quality work.