SEO services and the business of gaming Google - Don't over rely on SEO!

You know, it’s a bit embarassing for me to tell other people about dumb stuff I’ve wasted my money on, thinking it would eventually pay off (spoilers: it never paid off :P)... but the bright side of sharing these experiences with you WAers is that by doing so I can save others from making the same dumb mistakes I’ve made.

As I mentioned in another article, one big mistake I made was wasting my money on PTC sites and some shoddy PPC network. That was a kick in the stomach, sure... but you know what was a kick right in the NUTZ??

Paid SEO services.

Oh boy...

There are entire businesses and even companies out there created for the sole purpose of gaming Google, and maybe the other search engines while they are at it. Their promise? To help you optimize the on-site SEO of your webpages (because doing that by yourself is rocket science and is SO HARD!!11) as well as help you rank each one of those webpages for the keywords of your choice.

Some of those services charge for a period of work (like 30 days), while I’ve seen others that promise you to keep working, as long as it takes, on one of your webpages until it reaches page one on Google for a particular keyword of your choice... but the catch is that you don’t know when the work will be finished. It could take 3 months, 6 months, a year, two years... it all depends on how competitive your selected keyword is.

On the surface, that sounds like an awesome service. Shut up and take my MONIES, right??

Well, I fell for the hype on this one. In 2011 I had an Squidoo lens that I wanted to rank for a particularly competitive keyword, and I figured:

“Man, there is no way in HELL that I would EVER rank for that keyword, no matter how much backlinking I try to do to it... it would take me YEARS to even make it to page 50!!

No way... but man, it would be awesometastic if I got to rank my lens for that keyword... what to do, what to do...”

So I learned about the existence of SEO services, and I searched for offers on this on the Warrior Forum.

I found one offer where the author promised to have his SEO team work on your webpage (until the End of Time if necessary) until it ranks on the first page of Google for one of five keywords of your choice... all for a one-time fee of US $97.

I thought that was a bargain. No matter how long it would take, once my Squidoo lens reached page one I would make multiple times that amount of money! And then I could buy another backlinking service from the same guy to push my lens to the #1 place!!

And so I bought the service. I had to provide my URL and 5 keywords of my choice through a ticket system. They told me I could see the progress of the campaign by just checking the ranking of my Squidoo lens on Google, and that they would get to work and tell me anything important through the ticket system.

About 6 months went by. Through their “private” blog network those guys managed to rank my lens to page 50 or something, and it got stuck there for a while... I thought that it was possible for my lens to eventually make it to page one, that I just had to be patient and don’t give up hope...

... and then, Panda happened.

Google sent their mighty warrior Po (wait... wrong company?) to devour all Blog Networks from the web. And he ate them all like if they were made of fresh bamboo.

And what happened to my Squidoo lens? For the keywords I have chosen, my lens vanished from Google. It wasn’t on page 50, or on page 100 or on page 1000. It was gone. Poof. Vanished. Po gave it the Wixu Finger Hold and buired the remains.

But the people that ran that SEO service weren’t willing to give up. Once their blog network was obliterated, they decided to keep working on the campaigns of their clients (mine included), maintaining their promise of “ work on your webpages ‘till the End of Time!!”, but using other kinds of backlinking... like backlinks from wikis... and livejournal... and some social networks...

...blah. My Squidoo lens never got anywhere, but after a year of their mediocre service I still held hope...

“I just gotta be patient! It will eventually get ranked... yeah... it will... I just have to wait... hehehe... heh...”. lol, delusional much?

I was subscribed to their email newsletter, and one day I received a promotion:

Rank 2 webpages on the first page of Google for the price of 1!! It’s just US $97! Don’t miss this chance!! BUY NAO!!11one

I had two more Squidoo lenses that I wanted to rank. One for a not-that-competitive keyword, and one for a VERY competitive keyword. My rationality was:

“It would be awesome if my two lenses were ranked too, but I’m not sure if I want to backlink them manually... nah, I’ll just take advantage of this promotion and let the SEO people rank them for me while I work on other stuff. Yeah, that’s a smart choice!!”

If by “smart” I meant wasting US $97 yet again...

*facepalm*

I think there was another Google update 3-6 months after I bought that promo, and guess what happened...

The SEO business had to close the service.

They eventually “revamped” it or something, where they kept promising rankings on the first page of Google for keywords of our choice, but this time for only US $97 EACH MONTH. This wasn’t available for people like me who bought the previous packages, but they promised to “keep working” on our webpages...

To this day, the rankings of my lenses remain the same.

One day I asked on one of my tickets something like:

“So... what’s going on? Are you still working on my lenses or what?”

The response? Something like this:

“Oh, we are just done doing some social networking backlinking to your page!

Uh... and that’s it. Uh... write again if you need anything else! hehe... heh...”

You guys posted my links on Facebook, hooray...

... ugh.

At the beginning of this year, when I got the last one of those lame messages, I realized the following:

If I wanted to rank all of my Squidoo lenses... if I REALLY wanted to make it happen... *I* could’ve make it work.

I had already ranked a Squidoo lens I own on the first page of Google all by myself. That lens stayed in the number ONE position for about a year, and thanks to it I was finally earning money. And I could’ve repeated (and improved) the process I followed to rank that one lens with my other lenses. It would’ve taken much longer, of course... but if I had done that, I would still have with me all the money I wasted...

Hell, if I had not wasted so much money on PTC, shoddy PPC and those dumb SEO services, I would have enough to get a Premium Membership here at WA. That would’ve been a much more valuable investment than... well... all those other illusions I paid for.

Because that’s what I paid for. Illusions. The illusion of cheap bulk traffic, and the illusion of some mystic entity magically ranking your webpages for the keywords of your dreams.



Would I ever recommend anybody to pay for SEO services?

After what happened to me, no. I would not. Instead, I would recommend you, and anybody that asks me about it, to stay away from those “businesses”. You don’t need them. You really don’t.

Does that mean that all SEO companies are scams? I wouldn’t say that either. I mean, maybe there is a couple of SEO businesses out there that do deliver results for a fair fee. That's not farfetched.

But let's think about something first...

The people at Google wants their search engine to list results based on what other internet users find popular. And how do they find that out? Among many other things, by analyzing the number of backlinks pointing to a particular webpage. The idea is that these backlinks should be natural. They should be the product of someone linking to your webpage because they have something to share about it (they like it, they think it’s wrong, they find it peculiar, etc.).

So... how do you think the guys who maintain Google's search engine feel about businesses created for the sole purpose of manipulating the results of their search engine? You know... results that should occur naturally?

... not fair, right? The people at Google need to preserve the naturality of the search engine results. And that’s why we got Panda and Penguin and a lot more animal updates coming.

If I was the head of Google, I wouldn't want a bunch of gamers manipulating my search engine business like that. Thus, because I respect Google, I will never buy SEO services ever again; I just don't want to support that kind of businesses. I would also suggest to others that they don’t either... no matter how tempting is the illusion of those companies ranking your webpages for the wildest keywords.


Relying on SEO as your only method of traffic generation is suicide

This doesn’t mean I am against doing intentional SEO in general. I believe that doing things like writing Guest Posts for other websites, leaving valuable comments on other people’s blogs, and writing quality articles for sites like EzineArticles and StreetArticles not only helps you get traffic, but it also helps you improve your rankings bit by bit.

As I mentioned before, I’ve had success doing intentional white-hat SEO for one of my Squidoo lenses, and I do plan to keep doing white-hat SEO for those other two Squidoo lenses I mentioned before.

But I don’t do any kind of intentional SEO for my primary website. I don’t do keyword research for it and I don’t backlink the articles I write on my main site. I don’t even think about how my website might be doing on the search engines... I just don’t care.

This is so because to me, SEO traffic to your main site(s) should be unintentional. It should be just a nice bonus you earn from other people finding your content awesome and useful, and then linking to it. Or as PotPieGirl once said:

"From here on out, any traffic from Google should be seen as a BONUS, not as a business plan."

Google keeps refining its search algorithm and more people are arriving at the online business scene each day, creating content and backlinking the heck out of it. The competition for the top spots on Google is becoming more fierce each day... and the terrifying thing about this is that entire online businesses have had to shut down because of drops in rankings caused by updates in Google's search algorithm...

Because of this, I fully believe that relying on SEO for most (or all) of your traffic is a suicidal move. It is simply not reliable.

If you want you can have a side project to rank for a particular Google term, like a couple of Squidoo lens, or some articles on StreetArticles, or a small micro-niche site. But if you have a primary website, drive traffic to it by some other means. Personally, I recommend Guest Posting on other sites and/or doing collaborative projects with other people in your niche.

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Oki doki loki, I hope this has been informative. Thank you for reading, and expect a couple more articles from me! :D