A few (original) words on SEO scams

You know you’re in a commodity business when cute phrases and acronyms take over your conversations. Below are a few which indicate to me that the SEO scammers have a very short life expectancy, thank God.

SEO is in real trouble thanks to the scum out there who perpetrate the techniques I discuss in this post. Ion Leap doesn’t do any of these. We create high value content writing for customers and we base that content on solid marketing strategy, the kind we learned in advertising agencies for over 20 years. We do it this way because it works long-term and creates something that will really help our clients to succeed. The other guys, the scammers, are looking for a quick buck. Here are a few ways they achieve their goal:

Article Spinning – If your company understands the value of content writing, then you have a few choices in getting the actual brute labor of writing done –

• You can do it internally with some of your staff
• You can hire it out to a solid blog writer or content writing company
• You can hire out an SEO company who might end up doing what’s called article spinning

Article spinning is a way they stretch their investment in content writing for your blog or web pages. They basically re-order the phrases in the page, sometimes substituting words using automated thesaurus software. The resultant hash isn’t even remotely useful to the poor prospect out there who finds it. But the client is happier because they see their website slithering up the Google rankings. This technique won’t last long. Google must protect it’s brand and it will spank this technique.

This abhorrent practice is so prevalent that it’s even discussed on Wikipedia.

Link Farming – Those SEO companies who believe that outside links are important to please the Google algorithm often set up a series of servers with websites all pointing links to the others. It’s an easy way to get very low value links aimed at your website. Luckily, Google outsmarted this scummy technique very quickly. They now look for high value links that are surrounded by other good content with similar key phrases. Also discussed in Wikipedia

Imaging Email Spam – In this scam, the SEO “expert” promises you 2,000 hits to your website in a day…a single day! Then they build a junk email with some really random and unrelated photos in it. They spam it out to a few thousand people as junk mail, some of whom open it up. As the recipient wonders why they’ve received such a nonsensical email, the photos in the email show up on the client’s server as a hit to their website. They’ve simply built a link to a photo from their client’s website. No real traffic comes to the website, but your server logs show a hit. The newer email software like Outlook require that you must manually allow the photo to load, so no hit will show up on some poor unsuspecting client’s server log.

Link Bait – Maybe it’s just me, but when a phrase becomes this cute, I smell scammers. Link baiting is a way of putting content onto your website in such a way that other sites will link to it. If your website is taking the honest approach, then you’ll simply put up good content, market that content using social media, phone calls, direct mail, online banners and more and folk will love your site enough that they’ll link to it. If you’re an SEO scam artist, you’ll put up just one page, even off-topic with the rest of your site, in hopes of attracting links.

What to do

Well, we’re biased of course. But we recommend you get to the top of the search rankings the old fashioned way – earn it.

Let Ion Leap get busy on some good old fashioned content writing for you. It works. It works slowly, but solidly. We won’t promise a thousand hits a day, or that you’ll get to page one in a week (or even a month), but you will do very well.

You see, the Internet is just like real life, really. To succeed you must -

• Work hard to get ahead
• Offer your prospects good advice, start a conversation with them
• Sell a good product or service
• Care about people