Scambusters – Email SEO Solicitations

We can help you get more traffic! Your website is not ranking as high as it should for your top keywords. Free Marketing Assessment for your website. Marketing suggestion for insertnamehere.com.

If you are in business online, you’ve seen emails like this. Some of them may cause you to think they actually LOOKED at your site, and actually WANT to help you.

They don’t.

WITHOUT EXCEPTION, every single email you receive offering Search Engine Optimization or Marketing services is a SCAM. They aren’t all the same KIND of scam, but they are all scams. And no, there isn’t EVER an exception to this.

If you reply, one of several things may happen:

1. They just want your website access, so they can set up a phishing site inside it without you knowing. This is the kind of scam that doesn’t even pretend legitimacy.

2. They may just run an automated SEO Analysis on your site, and give you the results. Problem here is that computers CANNOT THINK, so ANY kind of automated SEO Analysis is completely bogus. That’s right. Meaningless. All that oh-so-scientific “keyword density”, and “frequency of h1 tags” garbage is just that… garbage. REAL SEO requires a thinking brain behind it, and only a real person can do it.

3. They may actually perform a service. Badly. NONE of them do a good job. NONE OF THEM. They typically do one of about four things:

They may do quick and dirty black hat SEO. Black hat refers to the stuff that every search engine forbids. And which will penalize your site eventually, if not immediately. They may completely trash your text, and replace all your good descriptions with stupid keyword strings. It always fails, for search engines and people – so you lose search engine traffic, and your site looks trashy to those who visit.

They may set up a scraping blog to pick up and redirect traffic for your top keywords. This is, again, completely ineffective, and will get you penalized. This kind of blog is ignored by search engines and people, both. You lose, and you pay for the privilege.

They may engage in “article marketing” for you. This one is VERY dangerous, and again, completely ineffective. Scammers like this are the reason our company no longer recommends article marketing as a viable marketing method – the article databases are so polluted with badly written unoriginal and downright shady articles, that even good articles don’t work for marketing anymore. Only one or two article sites even rank with the search engines, all the rest are ignored, and these companies who offer the service will tell you they are submitting to 50, 500, or even 1000 article databases. It is all meaningless, since none of them will get you any traffic anyway. It can be dangerous because they do not check facts when writing articles for your company – in the worst example of this, a medical company paid for this, and the writers wrote articles that opened them up for medical liability lawsuites, using statements like “this surgery has no risk”, and “results are guaranteed”.

They may spam blogs, forums, and social networking sites for you. Typically, they promise a certain number of submissions. They will then load everything into their automated system, press “go”, and walk away. Your spam (yes, it is YOUR spam) will be submitted to all those websites that have any kind of ability to do so – whether or not the topic is related. A few do look for related topics, but they do so strictly by keyword matching through a computerized system, so it is highly inaccurate, and often ludicrous. One or two actually hand-submit – but they aren’t any better at it than the computers, and the results are no better. At any rate, any site owner who owns a site which it WOULD be worthwhile to have your link on, will promptly remove your link, and report YOU for link spamming. Any sites it actually stays on are sites that are ignored by search engines anyway, and which people never visit either.

What they SAY they will do, and what they do, are completely mismatched. ANY company that emails YOU to solicit business, is breaking the law. Any company that emails you, offering to get your website in the top ranks, is fraudulent, and does NOT know their business. After all, if they could get a website to the top, why do they need to send you email spam to get business? They’d be getting all the business they wanted directly from the search engines themselves!

Just remember the rule – NO email offering SEO services (or anything else) is EVER legit. EVER. No matter how enticing it sounds, dump it where it belongs – in the virtual latrine.

Good SEO companies offer services you can monitor, and take the time to get to know your business, your goals, and what makes your company unique, before they dive into any work for you – including any kind of assessment. They’ll consider what your customers want to see, and then optimize THAT to attract search engine traffic. They’ll recommend or carry out marketing methods which work for YOU, and which reach your specific target market in meaningful ways. They won’t automate ANYTHING that requires a personal touch.

And they won’t ever solicit your business via an email that you did not ask for.