Typical SEO Scams You Shouldn’t Fall For

Website owners are always looking for ways of increasing their search rankings, but are not sure that hiring someone claiming to be a search engine optimization “specialist” is worth the cost. While there are some very reputable companies doing good and honest SEO work for their clients, not all people promising to improve your search-engine rankings will deliver the goods. Many of these SEO scammers are simply looking for easy marks who want quick results, and this is why Google makes every effort to educate website owners. Here are some of the most typical SEO scams you shouldn’t fall for:

Paid Links
External links are one of the things that help to increase website rankings the most, but links from reputable sources often take months, sometimes years, to accumulate. This is because it takes time for the word about your product or services to be spread far and wide across the Web. What some disreputable SEO gurus do is pay other sites to link to yours, and Google gets a might touchy about this practice that they consider cheating.

While this tactic will typically work in the short term, if Google’s algorithm catches on to the scam they will penalize your site and knock it way, way down in their search results. The world’s leading search giant even goes so far as to encourage users to report any suspected paid links to them, and you can be certain that your competitors will do just that if they catch on. However, the SEO scammers won’t bother to tell you that they are using paid links to improve your search results, and they don’t care if you get penalized, they just want to show you fast results to get your money.

Many victims of this SEO scam aren’t even aware of the behind-the-scenes hocus-pocus scammers use to artificially pump up their sites rankings. To protect yourself, require any agency you hire to provide a report for every link they acquire and how they obtained it. This can be invaluable should you receive notice from Google that your site has an “unnatural” link.

Who They Know
One very common SEO scam is someone at the company claims someone else at the company knows someone at Google. This is all intentionally made to sound very cryptic to make it seem like they are letting you in on an inside secret that most people don’t know about. Of course, it is all just a whitewash. Only a few select employees of search-engine companies, like Google and Bing, know the nuances of their companies algorithm, and those that do are required to sign very binding nondisclosure and noncompete agreements that provides for stiff financial penalties if they ever disclose a word of how the algorithm works to anyone. If someone at an SEO company trying to win your business tells you they have an in with Google, or one of the other search engines, just don’t buy it, or their services.

Hijacking Your Domain
One of the oldest SEO scams around is for an unscrupulous SEO company to not give you your login information if you decoded to switch companies. Some will claim they own your domain name, and while this may technically be true, depending on who set up the domain originally, and how it was registered, it is nonetheless a huge problem if you can’t get access to your own website. Getting your domain back from a scammer who intentionally hid the registration will often result in a long and ugly legal battle.

In this case, you can check the “Whois” database that maintains records of who the legal holder of a domain name is. If your SEO company does actually own it they will usually be willing to sell it to you, for an exorbitant fee. A big red flag is if a SEO company tells you that you have to register the domain with them, or worse, they insist upon registering the domain themselves. There is absolutely no valid reason for a SEO company to need access to your domain-registration account. Zip, zero, nada.

You can protect yourself from this type of scam by registering the domain yourself or having a third party, whom you trust, do it for you. Also, never give a master password to anyone you don’t trust with the life of your business.

This Is Google Calling
You get a message from someone claiming, or at least alluding, to be with Google or one of the other search engines who is promising to get you to the top of the search pages. While this may sound exciting, this is an indication of a true scammer, a real dyed-in-the-wool con artist, as no one from any of the search engines will every contact you trying to sell you SEO services. If you didn’t bother to register it privately, anyone can look up the owner of a domain online in about 30 seconds. This means legitimate telemarketers as well as scammers will be able to target you for all kinds of sales pitches. Protect yourself by making sure your domain registration is set to “private.”

1,000 Directory Listings
This is a classic scam that many SEO companies still offer. They claim to be able to list your website on a 1,000 linked directories. While this may sound good, over 95 percent of these “directories” won’t result in one bit of increased traffic or any long-term search benefits.

This is the old “quantity vs quality” gotcha. Google, or any of the other search engines, isn’t going to allow someone with an automated directory-submitting software program to game the system, in fact, it is just the opposite. It is specifically due to all the links in these worthless directories that Google has changed its algorithm, multiple times, to give sites linked from these meaningless directories a negative ranking. Rather than boost your search results, as the scammer claims, having your site listed in these directories will actually hurt your search ranking. Protect yourself from this scam by submitting your business name to the top directories yourself, one at a time.

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