blankWe recently took on a client that was in desperate need of search engine ranking help.  As of now I will not mention their name due to privacy concerns but I want to share their situation, the mistake they made, how they could have avoided it, and the drastic measures we had to take in order to correct it.

Two years ago, our client hired a SEO and internet marketing team from Seattle, Washington.  This firm guaranteed traffic to our client’s website and also stated that their website would eventually show as a top ranking website on the search engines.  Right off, our client stated that within a few weeks they got the traffic promised, but nearly as soon as their paid the invoice the traffic “shut off”.

This SEO and internet marketing company did not use optimized HTML and key-word placement, instead they used what we refer to as web-spam in order to place as many links to their website as possible.  How a company accomplishes this feat is nothing short of immoral and unethical.  These types of companies task “bots” to run rampart on the web with harvested websites of blogs, forums, and other “data posting” websites for public use and spams these sites repeatably until the site gives up deleting their spam or until the site disappears from the net entirely.  You can see these types of spammers as an example on our community blogging website at www.vraul.com.   Webmasters spend hundreds of dollars per week just keeping this spam out of their websites.  But some argue, “whats so bad about website spam?”.

Website spam leads to flooding of a website.  Once one bot hits the site, other bots, when crawling that website can also detect if other bots were successful at signing up and posting their filth.  Eventually the site is overrun by spam, the databases quickly filling up and the bandwidth of the server over-loaded.  In short, spam causes webmasters of great sites to give up, close their site, and causes undue work and strain on internet servers.

But we can’t get ahead of our selves here.  Not only is this type of “link inflation” immoral and unethical, search engines aren’t stupid and when they catch on; your site gets banned permanently from those search engines.  See this article (A webmaster complaining that his site was banned).blank

Don’t be fooled — SEO has never or will it ever involve “links” to your website!  Any company that tells you that they will get you “link-backs” are going to get your site banned, though temporarily increasing your traffic, you will NEVER AGAIN be able to get this traffic back.

After analyzing what this company had done with our client’s website and after talking to a few liaisons for Google, Inc, we came to the conclusion that the only way to restore our client’s website’s traffic was to completely purchase a new domain with very different content and design.

In short, our client’s choice in this company uncured more than $8,000 to completely reinstate their online identity because of one company’s “short-cuts”.  Always ensure that you investigate the company you’re looking for in SEO because its not just WEB SPAM they may involve you in, it may be regular spam as well and many organizations like WOT will near-instantly block your website from many browsers that use their security plugins.

Our methodology for SEO is simple.  Built a great website, ensuring that the code is compliant from the ground up, place the content in one-click’s reach, and inform the search engines the site is there; through this tried and true method, sites nearly always make top search engine rankings, permanently!