While there are many ethical SEO firms serving Internet users today, a few notorious practitioners also exist. One of them called me just other day.

“We can get your site to be number one in search engines for top 20 search terms you choose,” promised telemarketer. I don’t usually give telemarketers time of day, but somehow found this fellow to be intriguing. It was a cold and snowy day in Michigan right at moment, and somehow I felt warmer just hearing him glow about sunshine beaming through his own office windows.

“Show me results,” I requested. So we cruised web together, and he showed me some client sites that really did have top rankings. At first glance sales spiel sounded rather inviting, but after taking some time to consider and evaluate his company, I determined that what this friendly young salesman offered was nothing more than a scam.

As I did my homework, several red flags jumped out at me. By researching his company on Internet, I learned that they employed no less than 250 telemarketers soliciting SEO clients on a continual basis. With all due respect to size of this company, I found it hard to believe that they could service numerous SEO clients they were recruiting in a very meaningful way.

I asked salesman about this next time he called. He informed me that their SEO service was highly automated, built on proprietary technology that was so ahead of its time that no other firm could compete. In case you didn’t catch it, previous sentence contained red flag #2. In words of old adage, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably it.”

The above was only tip of iceberg, however. Upon further questioning of my enthusiastic sales contact, I learned that it wasn’t really my url that they wanted to promote. Their plan was much more beneficial--for themselves, that is. They would set-up urls to be doorway pages to my website. Their urls, not mine, would be optimized to get high in search engines. They would maintain control of and ownership of urls, so if I ever went out of business, they could sell all that traffic—and value I had paid so dearly for—to one of my competitors. Pretty nice deal for them. I pay them big bucks on an annual basis to drive traffic to a url which they—not me--own. Of course, I would benefit from whatever sales came through their url as long as I continued to ante up cash.