SEO Scams – Unsolicited Advertising Snake Oil

SEO scams are on the increase. What gives?

If you own a website with a contact form, if you maintain a blog that is open to comments, you’ve most likely received SEO scams in the form of unsolicited email advertising.

We’ve reviewed your site. Did you know that you don’t have h tags? That your meta data is missing? We can help you correct the problems. Our top-secret methods will achieve #1 search engine rankings.

Your business is not listed on Yext. A Yext listing will help your search engine ranking. Give us a call. We will submit your site to 1000s of directories. We can get you a #1 ranking.

Your keywords are/keyword density is all wrong. Using long-tailed keywords of 5 or more words will get you a #1 ranking. We perform in-depth keyword assessment, and give you the keywords you should be using.

Yada-yada-yada. You’ve received something similar to the above, haven’t you?

Maybe you’ve even opened the email worried about your site. Even if you are working with a reputable SEO/SEM firm like Directory One to keep your site ranking.

Have you ever heard of the term “snake oil”?

For those of you who don’t know, snake oil is a 19th century term for those miraculous tinctures that can cure everything from a hangnail to an abscess and everything in between. Snake oil didn’t work. It was fraudulent representation of a product to make a buck.

It’s still a rip-off.

If you’re working with a trustworthy SEO firm, you know that they take time to build a close relationship with you. They know you and your business and what makes your company stand out from your competition. They work closely with you to develop your site’s keywords, content, and advertising campaigns.

Your SEO firm takes helps you analyze your industry and your potential visitors to drive traffic to your website. You receive monthly analytics to review how you are getting visitors and what keywords you are using. You are given recommendations on how to adjust your site and coordinate your advertising and website content for approval.

Your SEO firm continually makes updates to your site to keep you ranked and the leads coming.

A good SEO/SEM firm does not send unsolicited SEO spam email advertisements. They don’t have to, since their reputation speaks for them. Period.

So what are these con-artists up to?

With the stagnant economy, it seems email advertisement is increasing. The SEO spammers have all sorts of methods up their sleeves to turn a quick buck once you sign up for their services.

Here are some of the things that could possibly happen.

• Attack of the robots. The SEO analysis you pay for is generated by a computer program. It takes people to interpret the numbers or adjust reporting parameters.
• Your hundreds, even thousands of backlinks may be built from spamming other sites. Even if the backlink is created on a related site, the site may not be relevant. Since your URL is used, it’s your spam, and you could be reported.
• Generating article backlinks could mean that they write a whole bunch of articles and submit them to article databases like Ezine. While there is some really good articles in article databases, most of them are really bad. The Penguin algorithm has given many of these databases a demotion, so the backlinks may either be ignored or at worst decrease your site’s ranking.
• They could actually mess up your site’s current ranking by changing tags, titles, and meta data.
• Once they have all your site information, they can easily set up a phishing site. This is illegal.

If you’ve received an SEO scam unsolicited email advertisement, contact your SEO firm and discuss the issues that the email brought up.

If you’re comfortable with the service your current SEO company provides and recognizes an SEO scam, just use the delete button.

Nothing feels better than round-canning SEO spam emails. And calling Directory One.