SEO Advanced Fraud Detection Guide

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Author: Joel Walsh

Article source: http://www.selfseo.com/. Used with author's permission.

Good SEOs aren't hard to find—the problem is that bad SEOs are so easy to find. Human greed combine with human gullibility in the fairly complex, ever-changing field of search engine optimization to create a situation ripe for charlatans and dupes.

Worst of all, since what works and doesn't work in SEO is constantly evolving, advice gets old fast. Google's SEO guidelines, for instance, focus on types of scams that largely went out around 2003.

Here's a more up-to-date (2006) guide to avoid bad SEO.

Basic Bad SEO Red Flags

If you've read anything at all about SEO you should know to avoid SEOs who:

• claim to have a special relationship with search engines.
• sell advertising on proprietary search toolbars.
• sell sponsored listings on search engines and claim the sponsored listings are the same as natural listing.
• have websites that are not in the Google index (to see if a site's in the Google index, type its url into Google and see if a listing for the site comes up).
• require clients to link to the SEO's sites or the SEO's clients' sites (this is a kind of link farm)

Advanced Bad SEO Red Flags

• Search engine submission. This is worthless snake oil—search engines have spiders that find webpages actively and decide whether to display a site based on what they find. Search engines only offer the URL submission option because they'd get so many emails asking for it if they didn't. Unfortunately, there are still some good SEOs that offer search engine submission simply because there is so much demand for it among an ignorant buying public. Good SEOs who feel the need to dirty their hands with this snake oil will rarely charge for it, instead offering it as an incentive to contact them or a no-cost bonus—i.e., "request a proposal and get a month of no-cost no-obligation search engine submission!"
• Optimizing for numerous search engines. As of 2006 there are only three search engines that get enough North American traffic to worry about: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (AOL's results come from Google). Ask Jeeves comes in a distant fourth, with too little traffic to make a splash except in very broad consumer categories. Stay far, far away from any SEO whose website or marketing materials mention dozen, hundreds, or thousands of search engines.
• Meta keyword tags. The meta keyword tag has not been used by major search engines for years. The only meta tags that matter even a tiny bit are the meta description tag and the meta robots tag, the one that you can use to tell search engines to stay away from a page. As with search engine submission, some good SEOs do offer meta keyword tag snake oil as a come-on. But run away from any SEO who tries to charge for this meta keyword tag "service."

Don't mention link-building or say it's not at all important. Links are necessary to rank well in search engines—without them, a search engine assumes a site is not important. Sure, links are way overvalued by many people in the SEO community. But you can't do without them completely, even if you aren't aiming to rank for competitive keywords. If you already have enough links to get search engine traffic just from content, that's great—but any good SEO would explain why links are unnecessary in your case, and not simply avoid the subject.