SEO cold callers threatening customers with Google ban Just read a disturbing thread on the highrankings.com message board about an "SEO expert" calling up people with quality sites & good rankings, and telling them that they are about to be banned by Google, unless they pay him money to fix their site.

More on this charming fellow here.

This is a particularly egregious example of behavior that clearly leaps beyond unethical right to extortion. But I find myself constantly surprised at the number of scam artists out there claiming they can instantly launch you to the top of the rankings.

Maybe it's because SEO has a reputation as being just a big bag of tricks. "If I insert these magic words in the page enough times, will the search engines will rank me higher?"

I get questions along these lines all the time from well-meaning clients who are somewhat savvy about the internet and search engines. And I tell them it just doesn't work that way. There just aren't any magic quick fixes. Maybe 4 years ago some of these tricks would work, but the search engines are too smart, and getting smarter all the time.

As I keep saying, "optimization" is becoming less and less important. SEO is now a matter of getting the basics right, and not making mistakes that will make your site difficult to crawl, or look scammy or wrong to the search engines. I focus most of my efforts on Marketing/SEM - developing more quality content, which is the only long term choice for generating business on your web site.

There still seems to be an endless supply of these slick talkers out there, and the myths and misunderstanding of what SEO is makes them seem more credible.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:09 AM