SEO is fraud? Look at the size of these top SEO companies | Hacker News Reader

SEO is fraud? Look at the size of these top SEO companies

topseos.com

10 pointsparaschopra22 comments

"Tell a Lie That is Big Enough, and Repeat it Often Enough, and the Whole World Will Believe It"

The term 'genre' seems a more fitting for SEO than the word 'industry'. There are a number of people who have become very successful with it.

If anything I think these numbers indicate that the model of piggy backing off an established service can be profitable (rather than just attributing value to SEO).

I won't outright say the entire thing is a fraud...hell even Isaac Newton was an alchemist. He was just remembered for things other than trying to turn lead to gold.

To be featured on TopSEOs.com, you pay between $5000.00-$10,000 to enter a competition with loosely defined metrics.

http://www.topseos.com/seo-ppc-competition

http://www.topseos.com/seo-and-ppc-competition/index/evaluat...

A high buy-in fee for a competition removes any semblance of impartiality, as firms that do not want or cannot afford to participate are excluded.

The only conclusion I can draw is that even the SEO ranking sites are misleading.

They are legit. They check out customer references and do continuous updates to their rankings. A great source to find legit firms. Usually someone is upset if they are just not included.

They actually use the funds to review the companies, research online, run benchmark tests, thereby making my job easier to choose the right firm.

I just browsed their competition, just look a little closer. It's actually 400/month per competition. So significantly cheaper than what you indicate. Frankly even if it was higher, it would just mean that the small agencies and one men show just get weeded out - often times they really do not have the capacity to compete with the big guns anyways.

I can conclude one of three things:

1. You are not part of it, therefore you are not happy. 2. You can't afford it, so why not point a finger at it instead. 3. Cost of any competition, or even the free competitions, does not indicate any impartiality. Keep in mind all entrants pay or don't pay.

SEO is not fraud. But a lot of people who do search engine optimization sure don't know what they're doing.

2. Why isn't SEO fraud?

As a business, you create your promotional message. And then you decide where to run that promotional message. You determine where your right people hang out.

Say you determine that newspapers and radio ads are 2 good mediums for your message. But if you run the same message without any tweaks for the specific mediums, you won't do very well.

Your message has to be relevant for the medium.

If you determine that your business requires a website (or that your business is a website) - and that a lot of your right people will be using the search engines, you need to focus on SEO. You need to learn the tricks of SEO trade. And make your message fit the medium.

3. 5 Minute SEO

Two parts of SEO:

i. Onpage SEO: Search engines look at your web page to determine what it should rank for

- The URL of the page has to be keyword rich

- The title of the page has to be keyword rich

- Use H1 and H2 tags well

- Make sure the entire website is w3c validated

- Use meta description for key pages (especially product pages)

- Create an xml sitemap

ii. Offpage SEO: Search engines look at who is linking to you to determine how highly it should rank you

- Get links from authority websites

- Create good linkworthy content - linkbaiting is actually good

- Get thousands of links from directories (blog / article / rss directories)

I understand on-page optimization (for telling search engines what is important on your pages) and having good, relevant content to link to. But what is the point of having thousands of links from directories nobody would ever care to visit? Isn't that spamming the search engines in a way?

No humans will ever actually come across the directory links. But search engines still take them into consideration while ranking your websites.

It goes back to playing according to the medium rules.

Note: don't only do directory submissions. If all search engines can see is you're getting link backs from not so good pages, they won't rank you well.

And don't only rely on getting authority linkbacks. Because if search engines see that you have very few linkbacks, they won't rank you well.

So use them both: create good content and focus on getting authority linkbacks. And at the same time, submit your site to various directory submission services. Quality + quantity linkbacks = search engines ranking you well.

I submitted this link because there had been lots of discussion lately that SEO is fraud and it isn't worth it. I stumbled across this link and the money that these companies are making really make me doubt that businesses don't value SEO.

What are your thoughts?

EDITED: corrected a typo

Companies value SEO because if they get higher ranks on search engines they'll make more money. So it's natural for a company to invest in a service that it'll grow their revenues.

There are really two separate issues with SEO:

1. The little legitimate stuff they do that would increase pagerank (better website design, alt text, metadata, etc.) is incredibly overpriced for the actual value, especially compared against SEO claims. But companies that don't shell out for a website designer that can do this in the first place deserve to be ripped off.

2. The even shadier SEOs will use botnet linkspam and the like. This is actively destroying the web and companies that do this do not deserve to exist period.

Companies do value SEO, though often for the wrong reasons.

There is a combination of SEO companies selling vague and expensive services, plus promising unrealistic results. On top of that, many small businesses think they can buy their way to the top of Google and get significantly increased sales through "SEO".

The vast majority of SEO boils down to creating good content and making your webpages compliant and robot-readable.

My opinion is that SEO doesn't add that much to the value of a website when the website is designed with good standards. Ex: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, meta tags, no frames, etc.

The fact is however, most companies wouldn't know if there website is build according to these standards. This makes it that SEO people can easily sell there product because which company wouldn't want to be higher on Google? I give you money, you make me first on Google, I get more money. That's the simple and sellable equation SEO companies give.

(It also relates to the common problem in web development. Most of the buyers don't know what quality they are getting because they will never look at the source code. They only see a pretty website.)

No. it’s not a fraud.

SEO is not a dubious thing in itself. It mostly isn’t a scam the way snake-oil is. It’s proven and established fact that a website can employ a host of legitimate techniques to climb their way to the top of a search engine result page: on-page optimization, terrific and viral content, string of PR activities, buzz marketing etc, among others.

However, the SEO market has no dearth of companies that promise unrealistic results and rip fortune off their clients. They aren’t aware of, let alone be capable of, anything further than submitting a site to a bunch link farms and filling up a web page with unnatural keywords.

There was a time when the field of medicine was swarming with quacks. But that doesn’t invalidates the veracity and effectiveness of medical science itself. A trained physician can do wonders to an ailing body.

I created a couple of websites because I don't want others to go through what I went through....I documented what happened to me on one of my websites, and the seo company said that if I didn't take down the site, they were going to sue me. So I took down some information, but I still got comments from x-employees to the effect that what they did to me is what they do in general....They either were once a big player in so. cal, or they still are...i don't know.

The websites are: www.seoincscam.com and www.seoscaminc.com the latter has consumer protection info in it.

Thanks for posting this...it is helpful

I wonder how much of it is from the long tail. I know small non-web savvy businesses that happily pay $1-2k a month to outsource their SEO, as business from yellow pages continues to decline.

I've seen businesses in yellow pages using questionable tactics as well, especially in the over-saturated areas such as Taxi's and moving businesses. A lot of the businesses advertised are actually one business, and they often have business names like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA Taxis" (this is usually found in small writing at the bottom of the advert). It's gaming the system but it obviously works. Same can be said for SEO.

I am pretty sure that the Nigerian scammers and multilevel marketing fraudsters made more money.

SEO is not fraud per se, but it smells like one. SEO works for sure and it may take your website from 100 page to the first page, but it feels like they are gaming the system, not adding value.

The thing that makes it smell like a fraud is that they can only improve a client's score if few others use SEO as well, and if a client is moved to the front page for some keyword, someone else has to drop off the front page.

So imagine a world where everyone uses SEO, what then? How could you ever move to the front page, if everyone else on it is using SEO as well? Cheat? Use better SEO? Who would win on an SEO arms race? Certainly not users, and I would imagine the search companies becoming even more annoyed about it.

Summary: rankings are zero-sum games.

well it is too much to ask for a search engine to be able to actually judge the qualilty of services provided by the enterprise. The current system has its merits and demerits and like any other system, it will be exploited by some

this seems a specious argument. bernie madoff made a lot of money, too. does that mean what he did wasn't illegal?

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