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SEO companies to avoid - SEO consultants to avoid

There are many SEO companies and SEO consultants that either make promises they can't keep or provide unethical SEO services.
These are the companies to avoid at all costs, Why? We hear you say, well there are three things that could happen:

1. Their SEO tactics are no good and nothing really changes for your website.
2. You get flagged by a search engine and receive a subtle ban.
3. You get banned from a search engine.

Now point 1 means you have wasted your money along with the loss of extra business you were expecting to receive.

Point 2 means again you have wasted your money but things are worse than they were before because you have received a subtle ban which means you have been pushed so far down the index that no one will find you, meaning not only loss of the supposed extra business, loss of money, loss of time but now the next SEO company has an even harder job on their hands and many will refuse to take you on.

Point 3, You guessed it, you’ve wasted your money, your time, loss of extra business, but that’s not all as things are as bad as they can get as you have now been banned from the search engine in question.
The next SEO company that takes over your site now has a real fight on their hands to remove the ban and get you re-indexed and that’s if you find a company, getting you re-indexed could take some time which no doubt will add salt into your wounds.

What’s that we hear you say, there are loads of SEO companies that will sort out my website once one of the above happens, That’s great but are they any better than your last company?
Read below for some of the things to watch out for.

Bad SEO Emails and Bad SEO Telephone calls

When a company emails or telephones you offering SEO services then alarm bells should start ringing, as these are "cold calls" or "spam emails" and as such they have probably not even looked at your website or taken the time to understand what you do and how you do it.
An SEO company that is any good will first work out whether they understand what you do and what your products do. This is the basics before they go any further otherwise how are they going to convey that information to a search engine if they themselves don’t understand what you do.

Amazingly we get these emails and telephone calls too, here’s a couple of examples:

Spam emails:
“Dear icktechnology,
I visited your website and noticed you are not in the major search engines, or you don’t list within the top 1000 results… bla bla bla”

Now the funny thing is if they visited our website then how did they find it, the chances are they found us in a search engine but the most likely case is that a “bot” has crawled our website and taken away our email address from the “contact us” page, then their software has sent us this spam message.

Cold calls:
We love these types of phone calls because we get them all the time and they make us laugh.
Ring ring, we like to answer the phone in 2 rings :-)
“Hello could I speak to the person who deals with your website.
Yes speaking.
Oh Hi, This is just a quick call to let you know we can double the amount of visitors to your website as we noticed that with some SEO we could get you up to the top of all the search engines.
Oh really how high up and do you have a guarantee.
Yes we guarantee the number 1 position in Google™ and other search engines.
How can you do that?
Well... (then there’s a lot of rubbish spoken at this point)
Just a quick question I have
Yes no problem
Do you know we are a search engine optimisation company, have you not looked at our website?
Oh? (Then the phone hangs up)”

It's amazing that these people haven’t looked to see where we are in the search results and to top that they haven’t even looked at our website, In our view these are the SEO companies to avoid, they don’t know what you do, they don’t know how you list, but then they don’t care they just want your money, and seeing it can take up to 3 months to see some good results from a good SEO company (sometimes as little as 2 weeks) then that’s a nice little earner for these people before you turn round and say its not working I don’t require your services anymore, but by that point not only have you lost a load of money but also three months worth of real SEO and three months worth of the extra business your website was supposed to pick up.

Just to let you all know, No one can guarantee the first position on Google™, MSN™, Windows Live™, Yahoo™ or any other search engine and if they do it will be for some useless "long tail" keyword that you would have got anyway even if you did no SEO on your site.

How are they going to SEO your site

Avoid companies who don’t make things clear, if you don’t understand something then ask them to clarify, if you still don’t understand then maybe you should look for another company.

Avoid companies who setup doorway pages or “throwaway” domain names as these are in control of the SEO company and if the relationship sours they could divert users to another website or worse to a competitor of yours.

Avoid SEO companies who say they will get you indexed by thousands of search engines, this is unlikely to have any real impact as really you should be aiming at the top five as optimisation is different for each search engine as they all index information differently and as such there needs to be a balance between them all, so trying to SEO for thousands of search engines is not really possible, if there are really thousands of search engines out there anyway.

Where's your money going

Make sure you get a break down of where all your money is going and what it is for as some SEO companies will say they have “control” over a search engine when in fact all they are doing is changing a bid price.
Some search engines will combine pay per click or pay for inclusion results with their organic (natural) search results and as such it is hard to see which are organic results and which are paid results.
This scam does not work with Google™ or Live search as paid results are clearly marked, however if your new to all this then it is possible for an unethical company to place you at the top of say Google’s results but tell you that ad’s are only on the right hand side, when in fact up to the first three results at the top on the left hand side can be from their paid advertising (Adwords™) results and once your demo is over the unethical company remove the listing as quickly as they created it meaning that you have just disappeared from the search engine results. So you must ask if some of the money is going on paid results which at the end of the day is temporary advertising as once the money has been used up you will be no longer listed.
Really there should be no paid advertising with SEO as this falls into the category of SEM or search engine marketing, please see our SEM information for how all that works and you will see the difference between them.

How to get your website banned

This is just a short list that can cause your website to get banned if your SEO consultant or company carry out any of the follow:

Puts links to spam sites or blacklisted sites

Puts links from spam or blacklisted sites

Uses or owns shadow domains

Has falsified or multiple aliases in the WHOIS database about their domains

Sends traffic from spyware, scumware or “fake” search engines

Sends viruses, spyware, scumware, malware or trojans to your web users

Uses hidden text or hidden links

Uses cloaking or sneaky redirects

Sends automated queries to Google™

Loads web pages with irrelevant keywords

Creates duplicate domains, pages or content

Money back guarantee scam

To be safe you should insist on a full and unconditional money back guarantee in writing before you take up any service.
Many SEO companies or SEO consultants offer a money back guarantee which is not worth the paper it's written on, If you read into the terms and conditions you may find that when they say "1st position" or "first page" actually means any keyword or phrase which at the end of the day is worthless as you could have done that yourself without any SEO work but also means that no traffic is likely to every come from these keywords or phrases. The other scam which is pulled is to put your website into the paid results hence first page or even 1st position BUT this is not 1st as an organic result but 1st as a paid result which at the end of the day can be turned on and of at will by the SEO company.

What to remember about SEO

Remember that you or your company are solely reasonable for any actions taken by an SEO company you hire and as such it’s your site that gets removed and its your business that will suffer should it not comply with the terms of any search engine.

Should I trust an SEO company that pays for their own listings?

I had a telephone call from a SEO company telling me my websites SEO was no good? They said I don't list for anything?

I got an email saying we are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories? What should I do?

I was told by a company that they could get me 1st place on Google™? Is this true?

We get these questions and many more all the time, what you have to ask yourself is, if they are as good as they say they are then why are they emailing and telephoning you. Shouldn’t they be busy with people finding them on a search engine and contacting them by telephone or email, not the other way around. All is answered on this website, so have a read before you choose any SEO company.

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