An SEO scam is easy to pull off whenever the customer knows less than the service provider and the latter sees this as their opportunity to deceive. Dishonest service providers will use plenty of jargon to appear more knowledgeable and trick customers into believing they can actually deliver the promised results. However, the outcome is rarely as good as promised.
1. Guaranteed Rankings
There are many companies claiming to offer any number of page one guaranteed rankings on Google or similar search engines.
This is an SEO scam because:
There is no such thing as guaranteed rankings, despite all the hard work of company staff. Moreover, every website out there has specific keywords that are unique to it in that order and page/ paragraph proximity; these will make your website rank on page one, so you are there already. Finally, page one rankings mean nothing on their own, unless they attract qualified traffic that results in leads or sales; that is, traffic that converts.
2. Website Submission to Thousands of Search Engines
To the unaware business owner, this will seem like a great deal.
This is an SEO scam because:
There simply aren’t thousands of search engines out there. Depending on where your target audience lives, the two most important ones are Google and Yahoo, followed by Microsoft Live and a series of rarely used search engines like Ask.com, Dogpile, Metacrawler, etc.
So what are those “search engines” the provider is submitting your website to? They’re spam centers, which will only get you flooded with spam emails.
3. Get on Google Page 1 in No Time
People who have a website but no sales may be tempted to try this in order to gain visibility.
This is an SEO scam because:
You don’t have to be an expert to get to Google’s first page right away: As long as you sign up for AdWords, just pick a keyword at random, and pay for your top placement. However, this alone does not guarantee qualified traffic and sales; you’re better off looking for an affordable SEO package that delivers the real thing instead.
4. Hundreds of Directory Links for Peanuts
Great website content sometimes brings about links, and we all know link building is the way to go when it comes to outranking your competitors. But writing meaningful stuff is really hard, so it makes sense to pay a small amount and get hundreds of links in return, right?
This is an SEO scam because:
Google’s ranking algorithm is based on hundreds of variables. In other words, achieving top rankings on Google is not this easy, and cheap links are usually weak.
5. Google’s Secrets Breached
There are service providers out there claiming either that they were able to crack Google’s algorithm, or that they have an inside man at Google.
This is an SEO scam because:
Both are absurd, since not all Google employees have access to the algorithm. Besides, this is so complicated that cracking it would be very difficult, not to mention that it is constantly updated, even several times per week.
Do you have any SEO scams to add? Please share them in the comments section below.