Naturally as the SEO market has grown so has the number of companies offering such services. Like any other industry there are honest, reliable companies who operate to high standards of good practice and there are those that don't really know what they are doing and/or are in it just to make a fast buck.

We've all seen the tv program cowboy builders where poor excuses for tradesmen are exposed for charging poor helpless individuals over the odds for a sub-prime job. Well this is the SEO version except I'm not going to name any actual cowboy SEO practitioners because that would just be libellous.

Instead I'm going to highlight a few practices these fly by night SEO companies operate so you can keep your eye out for them.

Mass Link Submission

This refers to a service generally offered by a third party which an SEO company may employ to add your site simultaneously to a pre determined list of directories for a small fee. The disadvantage associated with this is the vast amount of links built in such a short time often results in a site getting sand boxed as Google interprets this mass link building as trying to game the system. Combine this with the fact the predetermined list of directories can often originate from the same IP address and are of a poor quality for example no page rank and this is a service well worth keeping clear of.

Paying for lots of links

Some SEO companies will simply purchase all the links to your site from link farms which for a short while can work. As a long term strategy though this can work out very expensive as these links will need to be renewed at more cost and Google has got better recently at spotting paid links and punishes accordingly in your sites rankings.

Non Specific Links

Google makes it obvious it favours natural, industry or area relevant links so building links from irrelevant, unrelated sites or mass generalised directories will not hold as much sway in the rankings.

Only building for 1 keyword to 1 page

If all your links built are for the same keyword and directed to the same page the search engines will interpret this as SPAM and penalise your rankings. Its a lot better strategy to vary the keyword you build links for to provide uniform improvement across your chosen keywords as well as avoiding the SPAM trap.

Misuse of Forum/Blogs

It's perfectly natural to have a link to your site in your signature when commenting on forums and blogs but signing up to simply add links for SEO purposes may result in your links being made no follow which defeats the object of building the link in the first place.

Article Spinning

This refers to a technique where articles distributed by someone else are adjusted in part or the keywords swapped so the same article can be redistributed to multiple sites for part of your SEO campaign. The theory behind this is it should provide multiple links for very little effort but not only is this unethical as it is plagiarism it could also infringe the original writers copyright. Add to this search engines are getting better at spotting duplicate content and it's a technique worth staying clear of.

Above is just a snippet of some of the bad practice and unethical techniques that occur in the SEO industry. To make sure your SEO provider is using methods that will result in your site benefiting make sure you question them about the techniques they use. Joel Tarplin