Remember the old days, when online cheating and bilking was almost non-existent, viruses were rare and entrepreneurs were not worried about their rankings in search engines? There was no Google, however, people were passionate about the internet and had high interest in the web world.
All the passion was about getting a website due to the risk of being left in the dust by their competitors. A new industry was born and the demand of web designers at once increased due to people’s ignorance of how websites are made and maintained.
In short, websites were not “made for money” but the purpose of owning a website was overshadowed by the mantra of “I own a website”.
Then “search” has developed into a doable industry and search engines have refined their algorithms to rank websites. Another new industry, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was spurred up, many so-called “SEO Experts” also popped up making unrealistic promises and offering high rankings. You must also have come across such “SEO gurus” who are adept in using “unethical SEO practices” and promising to make all your internet marketing dreams come true in the form of high rankings.
They promise to make you more discoverable than before or make your website the first one to be noticed.
Too Good To Be True!
If you are going to hire an SEO expert for your website, you definitely need to know what SEO is and how hard it is to get the favorite rankings, if not impossible. Chances are, he is going to use unethical or black hat SEO practices to get the top rankings.
Let’s discover what are the top practices that unethical SEO experts use.
1. First rank in Google!
Everyone knows that one cannot get desired results without making real efforts for it. The same rule applies in today’s internet world, where you cannot consider yourself a market leader after a few hours of work. However, unethical SEO experts guarantee first rank in Google within a few days or even hours. Let me assure you that no one can guarantee top rankings.
SEO process needs sufficient completion time as no marketing campaign can be successful within a few hours.
Generate quality content from time to time and apply certain SEO techniques for a long period of time, only then can you expect top ranking. Remember, nothing is free in this world and you cannot achieve the best within moments.
2. Voluntary SEO Offers!
You may have received few if not several emails from unknown senders. Some of these emails are certainly about helping you out to make your website’s rankings high against a certain set of keywords and at low rates. Don’t wonder about how they got to know about your website and specific keywords. And don’t even get impressed. These so-called SEO experts use spiders to draw a list of URLs and email addresses.
Next time you get any such email from an unknown sender, who claims to be impressed by your website after visiting it once and intending to help you out in its SEO at a deal that will be acceptable for you both, don’t think twice on such an offer and simply trash it.
3. Fail To Explain!
Move on from an expert, who is showing you how dumb you are, just to prove how smart he is. Sometimes the expert claims to do something complicated that is difficult for you to understand, or says these are trade secrets that can’t be disclosed or uses non-specific terms. Don’t forget, real experts are zealous and have real passion for their work and will explain to their clients what they do and give their clients a chance to know the work details. They are neither secretive nor do they want to hide their expertise.
Ask questions of your expert and if he is hesitant to answer, it’s needless to say that you should not work with him.
4. No Guarantees!
SEO is not a fun job. However, no one can guarantee immediate results or high placement on various search engines. Fake SEOs use another unethical SEO practice which is using plagiarized content and copied content from other websites and passing it on to your website as original material. Even then they guarantee results in the long run.
Search engines immediately detect the duplicate content and reward the site a poor ranking. Beware of such SEO professionals who are using this practice for your website.
If you also come across any such malware or get these promises from your expert, be suspicious of him, and go to in-depth verification before handing over your website and putting your business at stake.
Enough said!