By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a good handful of clients and potential clients who have been speaking with other SEO firms. This an absolutely wonderful thing to see, as in
past in our industry, not enough of our consumers were questioning what they were purchasing. It is a sign that accountability will come and bad guys will be weeded out.While this is a good sign, it’s cause of my having to answer same questions over and over. The consumers in SEO world are being fed out and out lies by some of people who call themselves experts in area of Search Engine Optimization. They hear these lies and while comparing prices, contact us at Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly astonished. Here some of most asinine claims I hear through grapevine.
“We can guarantee your rankings”
Don’t be fooled! Ask company what you will be ranking for, immediately! 9 times out of 10, a company that guarantees you rankings, is guaranteeing that you will rank for your own company name, which means people on Google or MSN or Yahoo! would have to know your company name before searching. How does this produce new customers and visitors to your site? Chances are, as soon as these search engines index your site, you will rank within top ten for your company name, if not first, because it is unique. Why bother paying someone for something that is already going to happen, anyway?
Guaranteeing rankings is highly unethical. It is impossible to guarantee rankings unless you have access to Google’s database itself, and even then I’m not sure it’s possible. Keep in mind, we are working with a 3rd party, here. A highly guarded 3rd party that doesn’t, under any circumstances, reveal it’s secrets. No one outside of companies that run these search engines knows what it is exactly that makes search engines rank sites high. Especially due to fact that these search engines and rigorous ranking filters they use to spit out search results change almost monthly. Even a former Google employee doesn’t know how to guarantee rankings! If someone is telling you they’ll guarantee top rankings, run fast! Those are some shady, shady claims. Google themselves have said:
“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a "special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, only way to submit a site to Google directly is by using page at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.” - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
An ethical SEO company will not guarantee rankings. They will guarantee that their methods follow search engine guidelines, and they will guarantee customer satisfaction, but at no point in time will any SEO company with a conscience guarantee your rankings.
“Your site needs to be continually resubmitted to get on and stay on search engines”
When will I see end of this one? How old is this method now? 5 years? 10 years? We’re talking about days when Webcrawler was biggest search engine and all computers were beige! This claim is so fully untrue, had Pinocchio uttered it, his nose would have stretched from Rome to Poughkeepsie. And good folks at Google will once again back me up on this one:
