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Warning Signs of Bad SEO – Who Can You Trust?

By Nick Ker in Featured

Can SEO Companies and Consultants Be Trusted?

We get a lot of inquiries about search engine optimization services from people who have been “burned” by bad SEO and are understandably cautious about working with another search engine marketing company or SEO consultant. The level of mistrust should be increasing since the New York Times exposed link spamming by some very high profile online retailers, most likely through paid links. Paid links are when someone pays a website for a link to their own for the purpose of improving search engine rank, a practice which Google considers webspam and can get a website banned.

There are plenty of scammers in the online marketing business and just as many unqualified practitioners who do not realize that they are clueless.

A while back, I wrote an article about how to choose an SEO that covered some ways to avoid black hat and otherwise shady SEO companies and consultants. I left a lot of things out, so now seems like a good time to throw a few more out there.

Black Hat, White Hat and Big G

By admin in Featured

I read a lot of articles and postings regarding Internet marketing, SEO and the like. One frequently recurring theme is the distinction between black hat, grey hat and white hat methods. Interlaced with the use and abuse of these terms is the notion of what is “ethical” and what is not. It seems to be generally assumed that anything black hat is somehow unethical. More disconcerting yet, anything that Google frowns upon is often deemed unethical as well. I would like to clear the air about these terms which seem to mean all things to all men.

First of all, let’s put to one side for a moment the recently coined terms which euphemistically refer to SEO techniques under hats of various colors. These are not dictionary terms, and anyone can make them mean whatever they want. However, the words “ethical” and “unethical” have very strict meanings, have had for generations and their misuse can call into question the personal integrity of individuals. So what does ethical mean anyway? According to dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com/):

Men (and Women) with Hats

By Robert Cerff in Featured

SEO is so easily divided into two categories, the good and the bad, the yin and the yang… the light side the dark side.  Okay so it’s not all a battle between good and evil, but the Star Wars analogy is closer to the mark.  SEO is often broken into two camps those that practice safe optimisation (White Hat) and those that prefer to break the rules for immediate results (Black Hat).Much like Darth Vader, a black hat SEO will use all possible weapons at their disposal, often sacrificing a ship (site) or two on the way to gaining victory (top ranking).  This dark side of SEO breaks the “terms of service” set out by the search engines by any means they deem necessary.  The only thought is immediate results.  Sometimes these sites may show lasting results, but this is rarely the case.