Dishonest SEO Firms

5 Jan 2007 at 16:29 by Eric Morgan

Being in the SEO business we have had so many potential clients come to us with horror stories of their relationships with a previous SEO firm; in every case we have had to prove that we are ethical, honest, and worth it. What are your stories?

This is more of a request for comments but I am very interested in hearing stories from others of previous experiences with SEO firms; positive or negative. I am not saying all SEO firms are evil; I know there are many ethical and very reputable firms out there but it is the few sour apples that taint the industry for the rest of us.

For example we often have heard negative view expressed by many previous clients of a particular company near us that forced their clients into a year long contract, only to find out the results were not near what they expected after only a few months and even worse results after 6-12 months. I find this particular common practice very odd; why else would an SEO company force a client to sign a year contract unless they were confident that their system was inadequate and would not perform? The only real ethical reason I could see this happening is if you were providing a pay per performance model where the results of the SEO firm would really start to pick up after 2-4 months of work.

If anyone else has experiences or comments please post them.

digg digg it!  delicious, mmm Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://theorganicseo.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/11

Comments

Hi. I'm a freelance SEO writer, and believe me have I been asked to do articles for some dodgy websites and companies. I'm speaking mostly of *certain* MLM sites which I am afraid to mention for fear of my knees being broken.

Anyway, I'm trying to launch an ethical discussion about SEO practices on my blog, and the first post about it is at http://writenonsense.blogspot.com/2007/07/seo-ethical-debate.html
- which is a preview for my up-and-coming eZine article series which will feature different takes on the SEO game.

Posted by: Chase Richards at July 25, 2007 06:41 AM

Post a comment




(you may use HTML tags for style)

Recent SEO Articles

Why Google Shouldn't Discriminate Against Paid Links

21 Apr 2008 at 14:58 by Joshua J. Steimle

Because it can't accurately identify them. Frankly, I don't have much against Google having something against paid links. It's their search engine, they can do whatever they want with it. Of course I'd prefer they live and let live when it comes to paid links, for my own self-interest as someone who occasionally uses paid links as a way to build incoming links for my SEO clients.

But the problem is there's no way for Google--I should say "no effective way"--to differentiate between a paid link and one that isn't paid for.

The SEO Con Artists

17 Apr 2008 at 09:31 by Joshua J. Steimle

A real description of an SEO firm on an SEO directory:

Full service 1-on-1 SEO marketing since 1996. Check out comprised month-to-month packages at SEOgame.com (Eg. $375 package will start out at 2,220 manual directories and 550 manual article directory submissions) Manual submission services will provide permanent 1-way links and include 3 project managers and 17 site submitters to get the job done right with lots of worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk! Get to the top of the in less than a month for your top keywords today.

If you're shopping for SEO services and you hear this type of pitch, you might figure "Hey, it's only $375 and maybe I'll get something out of it even though it sounds too good to be true." But what you should be thinking is "For $375 I could take my wife out for a really, really nice night on the town, and the ROI would be higher to boot."

Fixing Other SEO Firms' Mistakes Using Dreamweaver Wildcard Search and Replace

20 Feb 2008 at 18:31 by Joshua J. Steimle

All too often we take over search engine optimization efforts for a new client, only to find that the last SEO firm or SEO professional they were using did so many things wrong it's going to be a major effort just to clean up their mess, let alone start making progress (although I suppose cleaning up is a form of progress, but you know what I mean).

Case in point, we just took over doing SEO for a billion-dollar enterprise with a substantial website, and what do you know, the last SEO people working on it stuffed the site full of stuffed image alt tags, stuffed keyword meta tags, stuffed url title tags, etc. And they were very thorough with their work in that they didn't repeat the content of the various tags, they mixed it up in every case so they aren't the same and therefore you can't do a simple search and replace to find them all. The slow way to get things done would be to edit every page by hand, deleting the offending code, but thankfully Dreamweaver lets you do a wildcard search and replace that is a lifesaver.

Organic SEO Articles >>