10 Hilarious Things A Typical SEO Company Will Tell You!
The mass majority of SEO companies out there have no idea what they are doing. Most of them make outlandish claims, which would be funny to anyone who knows even a little bit about SEO.
Why do most SEO companies have no idea how SEO really works? Because SEO is a largely unregulated field in the US and Canada. Also, most SEO companies are based in India or Eastern Europe, where there are no regulations at all (for the most part). You should not be surprised if you find out that most SEO companies are run by college students, who are just as clueless about SEO as you are.
Anyway, I have taken the time to go through and ask some SEO companies for quotes for some of my websites. Here are some of their replies which will definitely amuse you. I have pasted them word for word without making any edits:
1. Yes, we provide 100% guarantee that you will rank on first page for your keyword in 1 month because we give you lot of links.
It is ironic that there was no mention of a MONEY-BACK guarantee in their claim.
2. Directory submissions and article submissions are the easiest and best techniques for getting number 1 ranking in Yahoo, Google and MSN.
Apparently, they know no other techniques in order to get higher rankings. The techniques they are using will ensure that the website gets filtered or penalized.
3. Yes, some of our links are NoFollow but even they help with SEO in Google!
Golden words. You should write them down.
4. We do not employ any spam in our link building. We only post links on forums and on blogs by commenting.
AKA spamming. How do you put links on forums and comments if you are not spamming. Sure, this can be done in a non-spammy way, but I have NEVER seen this being done without the website owner going crazy because of spam.
5. Google loves links no matter where you get them from. All links are important and increasing link popularity is the best way to go.
Yes, it is for this reason that websites get banned and penalized. Get 100,000 from FFA websites.
6. Yes, blog comments carry a lot of weight in search engines, even if they are NoFollow.
Seriously?
7. What is NoFollow? Please explain.
LOL! This one cracked me up.
8. Yes, we definitely ask for reciprocal links because Google likes this practice a lot. Sometimes, this is all we do because it is effective.
And then you wonder why the website is getting filtered or penalized. Talk about begging the search engines to breathe down your website`s neck.
9. Yes, doing pay per click ads is a really good way to do SEO for your website.
By the gods, he speaks the truth!
10. We provide 10,000 links from article websites for only $74.99 per month!
Yeap, $74.99 per month is the way to go!
I don’t agree with your No. 5. you won’t get penalized if a crappy site or black hat site or link farm site link to you if you don’t link to them in return. If so, everybody would hurt their competitors…
I disagree with you on point 3 some nofollow links do count and they do help your rankings. Plus it also helps your link profile to look natural.
see the nofollow experiment
oh and on point 2 about directory submission they may not help a lot or anywhere near as much as a few years ago, but they do have a place in a link building plan.
Nevertheless people will still rush out and buy cheap SEO “solutions” instead of paying what it takes (not that some SEO’s are not masters at pushing the price limit). People will tend to believe something they want to believe. Here, buy this SEO Pill……
You are right that 2 way links don’t work as well as they used to. That is because, at first, any link had value. Then, quality links had more value. So while mindless reciprocal links gained popularity, they lost value. NOT because they are 2 way links … but because they had no real value anyway coming from pages with nothing but more links for content.
That’s also where the myth came from regarding too many links per page. Not from the links. But from the low value of a page of meaningless links.
Good post with some good points but I think you are generalizing a bit too much with some of your points. Having nofollows is helpful to SEO as far as link quantity is concerned. Not that you should be farming links but link quantity, along with high quality links, is still a factor in the algorithms.
Thank you for the article, it proved a good read and it’s good of you to let people know about some of these so called ‘SEO Companies’ who make ridiculous claims.
It is clear just by looking at the majority of their own websites that they don’t even have the most basic knowledge of SEO right such as title tags and structure.
Yes link building is vitally important but SEO isn’t just about directory submissions and, it’s certainly no quick fix 100% guarantee either. It’s an ongoing process and you don’t suddenly just stop doing it.
Montreal web design, it depends on the number of such links. Tens of thousands of them can hurt, even if they’re one way. A handful will just be ignored.
Steve,
There is some controversy about no follow links. Let’s put it this way — they certainly are nowhere near as valuable as follow links. I mean, if people click on the link, they still go to your site, so it’s not a total waste, but saying they help page rank is a bit more of a stretch.
Chas,
Two way links are damaging, but only in mass amounts. If you have the occasional two way link, it makes perfect sense and looks natural. On the other hand, if you have thousands of them, Google does directly penalize sites for that because it looks like link buying.
Simon,
The thing about directory submissions is that it can hurt you because Google sees many of these places as link farms. Again, it requires thousands of such links, not a handful to make a difference, but it does happen.