Because it's Google who rules our world

I receive spam SEO emails too and I'm sent URLs to shonky SEO websites with deals too good to be true, but if I didn't know what I know about SEO how could I identify a scam? What should I look out for? There are some dead giveaways, practices known to be scammy and you should avoid them because they'll get your site blacklisted by search engines. As a business, you'll want to be highly visible on the net, right? But if website exposure is your latest quest, protect yourself and read this post, it'll help you to identify an SEO scam and steer clear.

Bad practice is talked about in Google circles as Gaming Google or as Black Hat practices, like in the cowboy movies. When checking out your site, much of what Google is looking for comes out of Google's desire to weed out websites that try to game the ranking process. Google tries to foil the plans of guys who cheat their system. I really like this about Google, they continually try to make the playing field fair so quality websites with value to the community get listed too.

Given that there are approximately 3 trillion websites, Google uses a robot to check them out, to catalog them and make sure they aren't spam. Google's robot is called Googlebot, he's also known as a spider or a crawler. While Googlebot is growing more and more sophisticated, it's still a robot and robots don''t think like humans do. When you employ a SEO consultant, their job is to check through your site and remove content that will trigger the robot's suspicions, replacing dicey content with content that convinces Google your site is good, or credible.

Google communicates and is pretty transparent about what they're wanting to find, and not find in a website. Anyone can access Google's good practice documents online, the only criteria for entry is time and an internet connection. It then amazes me when I see a website offering Link Farms and Keyword Stuffing, 2 practices that Google has talked about explicitly as BAD and a sign that should warn you to steer clear.

What are Link Farms?
Link Farms sell hundreds of hyperlinks that point back to your site. The farm is essentially about nothing, its whole purpose is as a hyperlink holder. A quality link, in comparison, is when you link to industry relevant sites, but quality link building takes time. If you want your site to be seen as quality in Google's eyes than you need to either invest your time in link building or pay someone to do it properly. A business like PageOnePower, who are based in Bois, Idaho, specialise in building Quality Links only. That's all they do. Their minimum package takes 40 hours to complete. Page1Power hand pick pages for linking. Small Business on a budget can afford the same quality links, but built over a longer period of time. 

How many keywords can I have?
There is no explicit recommendation as to how many keywords is allowed, but Scammers offer multitudes of keywords planted into your site each month. About 9 years back, Scammers placed transparent keywords into their page that didn't necessarily relate to the website content. It might have fooled Google for a spell, but Google is not having it now. If the offer talks about more than 10 keywords complete, the Shonksters haven't read anything by Google for at least 9 years. I'm not saying 10 is the magic answer, I'm saying that many more than 10 is a sign that Voldermort has just entered the room and you should leave.


Fake Content
Can you imagine that there are bad little robots on the net that crawl websites and 'scrape' them, copying text indiscriminately? The programmers who create such a robot plan to reuse passages copied from other websites to update their fake sites. Rather than generate any quality information themselves, they reuse the stolen text to give the appearance of continual fresh content being added, hoping to fool search engines that they're active. 
It's a dark dark world beyond Kansas, Dorothy, but Google is onto it. 


Spelling Mistakes
Spelling mistakes on a publicly released site really shouldn't happen as a matter of professionalism, but any SEO consultant worth their salt would know that Google sees spelling mistakes and bad grammar as an indication of foul play. Googlebot is on the look out for signs of scraped content stolen from other sites and may see poor grammar as similar to broken sentences smashed back together by a robot. If you see spelling issues everywhere on an SEO offer, get out of there, they haven't read anything by Google in a while.

Blacklisting
Little Googlebot is a very sophisticated piece of software and he'll visit your site in the next 3 weeks and look at words, passages and images and consider whether your material has been duplicated from somewhere else. He'll also be programed to check your links and the links pointing to you and he'll ask whether they look 'normal'. In about 3 months he will have completed his indexing of your site and the results of his visits will start to show in your rank.
If your site is found to have been gaming Google, Google usually notifies the person identified as the owner in their Webmaster Tools, but if that person is the scammer than you probably won't know you've been penalised until your site falls out of a Google search listing. The blacklisting won't be immediate, it may take months, but it's a risk that needs to be considered carefully.

What if Googlebot mistakes your site as a scam?
This can happen. What if you've accidentally purchased work of a Scammer and your site is blacklisted?
I suggest you type an email with your apology, state how sorry you are for buying something you knew was simply too good to be true, print it out, wait for a cyclone and set it free in the raging wind. It will take less time to get to Google than emailing it. Google is a multinational corporation. Google rules the world, at least the internet world anyway. Don't hold your breathe waiting for word that you've been let off. With the damage done you'd be advised to start again and build a whole new site.
A good SEO maintenance plan will watch over your links carefully, removing broken links and inspecting the quality of hyperlinks you've purchased in days past.