Andy Forsberg's Blog

These days there are a lot of fake SEO experts and firms out there. SEO can be a very worthwhile investment with massive ROI potential if it is done right. When you look for SEO services it is crucial that you are able to spot the difference between a true expert and a phony. I’ve saved you some trouble and listed some simple ways to out a phony.

Ask them to name some industry leaders

If they don’t mention Matt Cutts, Aaron Wall, or Rand Fishkin it’s an obvious sign they are likely bogus.

Ask for verifiable examples of their work.

Request specific web sites that they can prove to own, either via a whois lookup or have them modify the page in some specific way to prove it is theirs when possible. Make sure that the term they are ranking for is actually fairly competitive and they were the ones responsible for achieving that rank. It’s understandable that they’d need to keep their client’s identities under wraps in most cases, but they should be able to provide you with something if not their own web site.

Get some statistics on their web site

Check the Google PageRank, the Alexa Rank, and the Compete Rank of the supposed SEO Expert’s web site. A good way to do this is using the FireFox plugin-in SearchStatus. They’re likely not much of an expert if they don’t have a Google PageRank or an Alexa Rank or a Compete Rank. I mean if they can’t optimize their own site, what’s to say they could optimize yours?

Google the supposed SEO Expert’s name

If they don’t have a very common name and they’re not in the top 10 results, it’s an obvious sign they either don’t really know their stuff, or they’re not serious about being an SEO expert.

Ask them if they can guarantee you a #1 spot in the search results for a competitive phrase

If they say yes they’re a phony. Obviously it is easy to be #1 for “the most ridiculously specific and completely worthless longtail keyword in the universe” – hell my blog is probably #1 for that now and it’s just in the body text of my blog post. You get the point.

Ask them how important keyword density is

If they try to tell you of a spurious magical ratio it’s time to consult a real expert/firm.

Ask them how important search engine submissions are

If they try to tell you you actually need to submit your site to search engines you’ve caught them in a lie. That or they just have no idea what they’re talking about.

See if they have gone to Google Webmaster Help to get answers on how to do basic SEO

Andy Search guides, methods, seo, tactics

1. Require a form submission with a captcha, to get to any page on your web site.
2. Don’t use a page title or use the same page title for every page of your web site.
3. Link to as many shady spyware/virus-prone web sites as you possibly can.
4. Put loads of text that appears to be stuffed spam keywords in a text color the same as your web site’s background color.
5. Use a meta description on every web page on your site that reads “The requested URL was not found on this server.”
6. Make a text file named “robots.txt”, put this in it:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /
   
   Then save it and upload it to the root directory of your web site.

7. Set all of your web pages to 301-redirect to new URLs, on new domains, every minute. Do the same only with 302-redirects every 30 seconds.
8. Sabotage all web sites that attempt to link to you.
9. Install a script that automatically creates 1,000 one-character variations of each one of your web pages, then links to all variations on each variation’s page.
10. Pull a John Chow.

Andy Uncategorized epic, fail, list, seo

These scores are better than what I thought they would be considering I just put the site online like a week ago. For some reason the Grader badge doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll be sure to scan the site again in a month or so and do a comparison. Grader seems to think more highly of my site than SpyderMate. I was hoping SpyderMate would have more love for my site.

Andy Miscellaneous analytics, seo, stats, tools