Toronto SEO Firm - GTA SEO & SEM Specialist

Crusing through DigtalPoint forums I found another SEO fraudster coning folks with an old style scam with a fresh new twist. the guaranteed results or your money back swindle.

In this version (as seen below) you pay in increments as this hard-working SEO moves your rankings up the ladder at Google.com - the only problem is that there is next to no competition for the keywords so my dead grandmother could guarantee these steady climb of these keywords.

In order to prove our worth and establish some credibility, we have created a performance-based payment schedule:

• $99 down payment
• $100 due once your site reaches Google top 20
• Remaining $100 due once your site reaches Google top 10

When called out by IC_IC, in this post:

With all due respect the phrase you are trying to rank for below has a competition of 5 in quotes.

Move In Free Realty: “move in free Houston”
as a matter of fact so does this one:
O.C. PC Guy: “tech consulting Orange County”
You could probably take number one spot in either of those with a handful of links.
Do you have any better examples?

He gets quite angry and has a reply similar to the last scammer (could they be studying the same ebook; how to scam using SEO)?

“Analyze the competition of my clients’ keywords all you want - they chose the keywords that they wanted to rank in the top ten…not me. Bottom line: our company delivered a Google top 10 ranking as promised. ”

The absolute best part of this guy is the URL he runs his SEO from, drum-roll please…..www.centralvalleygiftcards.com!

There have been a few posts recently about all the fly-by-night SEO scammers that are giving the entire industry a bad name.  Here is an example of one on DigitalPoint forums and I have seen this style of SEO scam run dozens of time over the past few weeks.

Here is their sales pitch:

Keyword Optimization Service - Customer Satisfication guarantee

---

Search Engine Placement Introduction:

web-designlk.com is an Natural Search Engine Optimization Unit, that builds professional search engine marketing strategies for long-term keyword placement on major search engines. Our search engine marketing strategies offer your company a logical solution for exposure to the Internet public through intense research and development to assure any company success within search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Why Web-designlk SEO Experts?

Web-designlk Srilanka We’re specialized in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing . We have the Proven Experience and Expertise in Optimizing Website that Succeed by Bringing in Best Enquiries, Which Generate Sales and are an Asset to Your Business.Customer Satisfication is Our Main Goal, Our Professional Keyword Optimization Package features a unique two step process to optimizing your website for a higher ranking in regular search results.

1st Step -
1, Keyword Research / Competetor Keyword Reserach Analyzing
2, Optimize Your Webpage [onpage - Opt] Contents .

2nd Step-

1, off-page search engine optimization Link Building
2, 3rd Party Personal Campaign Launching & Start Submissions + Opt.

Why Keyword Placement is Important?

• Boost Your Search Engine Traffic & Maximum ROI
• Drive Real Traffic Your Website
• Increase Your Business Conversation
• Multiple First Page Listings
• Dominate Your Competetor Keywords
• Long Term Search Engine Popularity

Actually does not sound too bad, and certainly at the top end of the spectrum for Indian based SEO scammers.  But as pointed out in the thread, once you look a little deeper into what they have achieved in the past for clients the smoke-mirrors and BS start to unfold.

Working from your keywords in your screenshot I will call you out on your service:

Url: http://www.vengadeshwaraa.com
Domain Age:11 Months
Current PR: 03.
Project: 5 Keyword opt in Top Ten.
See Screenshot

For number 2 keyword there is 2 competition in quotes, for number 3 keyword there is zero competition in quotes and for the third keyword there is 1 competition in quotes.

Charging a customer to rank for keywords with almost no competition is very shady and then posting those results as proof of your SEO skills is quite deceiving.

Good catch IC_IC, this is one of the most popular scams out there and most webmasters (especially the beginners) don’t catch it.

The response given when confronted with this obvious fraud is priceless:

“we are just working with client requirements only, if client needs only this keywords , we will particular keywords. we dont care about traffic..”

and that pretty much sums up the state of SEO fraud.

I have heard it so many times from prospective clients, “but so-and-so at ProSEO.com promises page one or number one results in 1/2/3/6 months or they will refund my money, will you offer the same?”

Guaranteed ranking is one of the biggest scams out there right now and anyone that offers it is not a real SEO.  Real SEO’s understand that you can’t guarantee results because the search engines algorithms are secret and change contantly.  There are also other factors beyond the SEO’s control, what happens if your hosting has an outage during a Google indexing and  your site is dropped?  What happens if you site is hacked and someone puts spam in the content and it is de-indexed?  What happens if someone that has access to your site decides to change the title tag and your site nose-dives in the rankings.  What happens if…..

There was recently a very intersting and upsetting fiasco on DigitalPoint forums with a couple of senior members that were offering a guaranteed SEO ranking service.  The long and short of it was that senior member A and senior member B joined forces to offer an amazing SEO service that was guaranteed results or your money would be 100% refunded.  Here is an exact quote,

I am giving a FULL MONEY BACK GUARANTEE because if anything goes wrong, I will be responsible and no one else and I will be more than happy to REFUND YOU FULLY NO HASSLES!

Compensation is 100% money back as promised. Once the position is achieved, the negotiation will take place in order for your keyword to maintain the position.

I will rank any keyword (Yes you read this right, ANY KEYWORD) or any key phrase in the first page of Google with the competition of under 2 Million in the period of 4-8 Months. Of course many people here on DP can probably do SEO jobs and they can do it great but can they offer a MONEY BACK GUARANTEE?

This was promised by a member that has over 13,500 post and an iTrader rating of 462 complete successful deals.

Soon these type of posts began popping up (there was supposed to be a monthly report):

still no report and it is now half a month late. how many more broken promises are we going to have to put up with?

Still waiting for my report for the service I ordered on the 20th of February

Still no report. You said it would be sent on the 29th and then on 31st and still don’t have it.

Our report has not arrived despite numerous promises from you. Are you going to send it or not?

Please may I have m reports which you have promised you will send me on several occasions.

STILL waiting on a report DESPITE two weeks of being told “i’ll send it today”, this was due on march 14th. Can you send the report today?

Still waiting for report from the 5th from SEO services. Any idea when it will arrive?

Sold my share in “First Page in Google Services” ~ now owned by KingofKings 100%

As of today, these services are 100% owned by KingofKings via private arrangement. This service is in regards to all sales for the following threads:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=532262
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370

KingofKings is now taking these services to the next level of which I am unable to spend time on, due to other business projects.

Then the stuff really hits the fan at full speed:

That’s the problem I have. I am unable to fix whatever problems exist. King has the money, not me. If there is refunding to happen, it will come from King. If I did have the money I would refund people.

If you want to read the whole sad tale then head over to this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370&highlight=100%25+refund 573 posts in that thread alone with over 22k views.  It is estimated that over $60k in SEO fees were stolen.

I read a good informative post by Doug Caverly at WebProNews.com, it talks about some changes Google has recently made to their section on “What’s an SEO?  It seems Google has taken down their warnings about SEO’s a few notches.

The old version mentioned “a few unethical SEOs” in the fourth line and then jumped into a list of warning signs.  The revised help page introduces a negative in line three, but uses the gentler term “irresponsible.”  From there, it names a lot of possible benefits.

“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure . . . Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript . . . Content development . . . Managing online business . . . development campaigns . . . Keyword research . . . SEO training.”

Relatively neutral, background check-type questions follow, and then the same warnings eventually appear.  It seems Google now has fewer qualms about nudging people towards SEOs, though, or has at least decided that its old description came off as too harsh.

Barry Schwartz deserves credit for unearthing the less-than-sweet version.  And perhaps as another way of saying “sorry,” Google’s asking people to contribute their own SEO-related recommendations.  Google has upset so many folks with it’s seemingly non discriminate penalties that it want to make nice with a portion of their professional user base?

There have been rumors of such techniques floating around for ages and there are even some black-hat SEO’s that specialize in this type of “link bombing”.  The gist of the deal is that you create organically or through purchase ‘bad’ links to your competitor’s websites in hopes of causing their search engine rank position to plummet.

There are a couple of interesting posts floating around about this practice because someone from Google has chimed in on this controversial topic.  It is funny how a subject matter can take on a complete different view depending on how you look at it.  There are a couple of headlines out there that in my opinion are quite deceiving: “Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can’t Hurt You” and “Google Debunks Link Sabotage Theories” - In both cases I think the reality is the complete opposite of the titles.  Here are the two quotes that made me realize this, “Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.”  To me this means that some of the guidelines refer to incoming links and those can and will affect  your site in a negative way.  The next quote is even more ominous, “In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.”  This last one tells me that it is possible and because of stiff competition I believe it is even likely.  Sure, if it comes to their attention that it is being done it can be resolved but it might never come to their attention, right?

Bottom line is that it is very unfair that something beyond your control should affect your website’s ranking.  Especially when it is so easy for a competitor to use these techniques to harm your site.  I am also guessing that the occurrence of this type of black-hat technique is much more prevalent than anyone knows.  After all, a few positions in Google ranking for popular keywords can means 10’s of thousands of dollars to some businesses.

Yahoo has been busy as a beaver (as we Canadians would say) with a slew of new announcements yesterday.

The most interesting one is the launch of Yahoo! Circular, an online retail marketing program modeled after newspaper circulars/inserts.  This activity blitz comes just as Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting was set for August 1 where Corporate raider Carl Icahn and a slate of new board members are expected to attempt their coup at the meeting, targeting CEO Jerry Yang’s job and trying to force a Microsoft acquisition agreement.

As part of this aggressive plan, Yahoo has brought Walmart.com on board in a multi-year deal allowing Yahoo to provide display and video advertising for the retail giant. Wal-Mart also announced this week its foray into the classified advertising space. According to the Yahoo deal, Wal-Mart will use Yahoo’s AMP! Advertising management platform to reach Yahoo audiences, and Yahoo will be the exclusive reseller of Wal-Mart’s display inventory.

I wonder if all this excitement and activity will die down once the Yahoo! changes ownership?

Here is another screen capture (click to enlarge) of some of the local competition, while I won’t comment on their pricing I can say that their website is very 90’s - and super light on information but they do rank well for some competitive terms so maybe they are worth every cent?

One thing I know for sure is that with all the changes expected in search engine ranking, SEO and SEM will be even more important.  The goood ole’ days of tricking the search engines with black and grey hat spam will soon be gone.  Both Google and Yahoo have both applied for patents which will look much more closely at the quality and structure of websites in determining their rank value.

For those of you following my progress you would know that I have been doing SEO for about 3 years but only for in-house clients and my own websites.  I recently decided to take on a few new projects, hence the development of this site.  www.torontoSEOfirm.com first went live on May 9, 2008, just over a week ago and already I am ranking on the first page of Google results for one of my targeted terms (see image below) - We even have a site-link for our newest post! - This term does not have a lot of competition so it is not exactly a monumental accomplishment but it does give a good indication of how ‘doing things right’ can have a very positive effect, even with a new site.

Not to say Ask.com is anything like a pimple but we are talking relative size here.  The question is, can a search engine that is 1/17th the size of the industry leader run a profitable business model?  The answer is, YES! 

Forbes is reporting that Jim Safka, head of Ask.com announced his company will acquire Lexico, the owner of sites including Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.  The deal has an estimated acquisition value of over $100 million dollars.

Back in March Ask laid off just under 10% of it’s workforce and decided to focus on women above 30 and web searchers looking for answers to questions about health, fitness and entertainment because it appears this niche made up a majority of their user base.  With only a shrinking 4% share of searches Ask seems to be holding on by a thread.  There has even been speculation that they would soon be dropping its own search algorithm in favor of licensing Google’s search technology.

Safka denies this claim and say that the new Lexico acquisition is to take advantage of current Ask.com users that tend use full-sentence questions three times as often as users of other search engines.  So for now it looks like Ask.com will keep up the fight and just try not to go head on with Google but instead to attempt some innovative side-steps in hope of capturing a bit more market share and perhaps some more loyal customers.

I have been a critic of Google’s posturing and seemingly indiscriminate awarding of penalties for a long-time. 

There has been a ton of speculation around the industry of -20, -50, -60, -100 penalties (for those laypersons this is a SERP penalty that subtracts ranks you should be awarded, so if you normally should rank number 9 for a specific keyword or phrase, with a -60 penalty you would rank number 69 instead).  Someone found a site listed in number 61 position with sitelinks, usually sitelinks show only for the first result in a Google search.  Rumor has it that these penalties are being applied because of the suspected purchase of paid links.

I have said it before and I will say it again, until I see proof that Google can read a webmaster’s mind I don’t think these type of penalties are fair, or a good businesses practise for that matter.  If Google is going to punish websites so serverely because they ‘think’ the owners have bought links then it is going to be really easy to sink the competition.  Simply go on a little spending spree buying up site-wide links on some crappy unrelated pharma sites and watch your competition sink in the SERPs.

I better get busy and check my Paypal account so see how many competitors I can afford to get penalized.