Website owners tend to believe that by using the services of a cheap SEO firm they won’t be getting on top of the search list, but they will benefit of certain improvements and enjoy a better ranking nonetheless. Reality, however, shows that the evolution is never upwards in such case when unethical tricks are being put to use to deliver a ‘quick solution’.
The Truth About Most Cheap SEO Services
When you pay little, it means that the company’s effort is also little. With the new regulations, a SEO professional’s work can’t be easy. When you are promised quick results, you should erase that name off your list. What such firms will do is to by-pass processes and use treacherous practices that may improve Google rankings at first, but it’s never worth your money in the long run – not even that small sum you had to pay. The tricks are eventually discovered by Google, which may even ban your site as a consequence.
The Unethical Methods Employed
What ruins a website’s reputation is a series of strategies that we can describe as follows:
Cloaking – presenting one type of site to search engines, and a different one to viewers.
Duplicate content – copying content from your own pages or from elsewhere, especially in large amounts.
Robots writing websites – getting a machine to write diverse content for the site, through programs that not only duplicate content but also make small modifications here and there. Google is very good at catching this and it will take those pages down.
Adding unrelated keywords – making use of meta keywords that are not strictly descriptive to your site and content, for the only reason of being found by Google. Also, repeating the same keyword is a negative tactic, as well as using the competitors’ trademarked names. Additionally, by creating a too long list of keywords you are sure to have your ranks lowered.
Bad link exchanges – linking back to irrelevant sites, creating links to sites that …
Paid link placement and other schemes to manipulate PageRank are terrible, especially creating an artificial web of links.
Title stacking – stuffing titles with keywords, adding extra tags, struggling to make it ultra-relevant to one certain topic by adding several terms that describe the same thing in more ways.
Hiding text – adding keywords but making them invisible by using the same color as in the background. ‘Font matching’ is a form of keyword stuffing and is an offense to ethical practices. The same goes with minuscule text containing additional keywords.
All of the above are simple tactics and are preferred by companies that want to get your money quick for very little effort. Just as you think your website has been optimized, Google identifies the tricks and gives it a down rating, from which you may never recover.
Advice to Ease the Work
Writing your own content is recommended in order to avoid those tricky services that will want to take over this task. Also, when it comes to linking to other sites, keep in mind that the quality of your peers influence your own reputation. Try to do as much as you can by yourself, unless you want the company to take over – and they may not employ the best methods in your interest.