Fraudulent SEO practices taking away traffic from your site

It sounds pretty odd but it is true as sun coming up each morning. There is often a lot of hullabaloo taking place in the name of basic ethical SEO practices. It will come as shock to most of the SEO people that the search engine competition has entered into its ugliest phase now.

A CEO of a leading Midwest search firm described their common practice of creating fake accounts to pump client links into the comment section of blog posts and forums.

The process goes something like this:

• The company hires home-bound individuals or low-wage people in developing countries to freelance as professional blog commenters.
• The blog commenters are trained on how to pose as fake people and comment in a way that does not alert the suspicion of Google or the author of the blog.
• The freelance commenters are then given assignments, fake personas and email accounts to provide an appearance of legitimacy. A 50-year-old man in Indianapolis might be posing as a 30-year-old housewife in Pittsburgh, for example.
• The commenters are compensated by the number of client links they can successfully work into a comment or forum — as many as five in one post.

In this whole process fake comments are posted in response to a blog or article and fake commenters’ own links are provided in it, which is clearly an effort to make a dent in the traffic of a company which is all ethical. So you need to weed it out every day if you don’t want your traffic to get diverted to some other website.

It is a well known fact that Google fights against this kind of practice, but it is very difficult to detect, and the “penalties” are so minor the risk is ignored by the SEO’s. And the volume of fake comments is likely to get worse. This firm alone has hired 300 fake commenters in the past 12 months and sees rapid expansion as a key competitive advantage.

The CEO of this SEO company does not consider this a “black hat” SEO practice — “it’s gray,” he said, “and we have many companies willing to pay us a lot of money to do it.” He bragged that one client has a monthly SEO bill of $200,000.

The strategies that can come from legitimate SEO professionals are:

• Keyword research + targeting
• Testing + optimizing content for users
• Content strategy direction
• Making sites search-engine friendly
• Leadership for analytics
• Opportunities for alternative search listings
• User experience improvement

… and more. But most of the people are concerned when it gets difficult to compete in the industry without engaging in fraudulent behavior. This is a slippery slope that will lead to regulation. All it will take is one high-profile case that blows the lid off these practices and the people involved in these practices will all lose if they have to endure new rules and the cost of compliance.

It is good to do business with people who view ethics as black and white, not gray and you would want to work in an industry where you can compete fairly without resorting to SEO fraud to cover up ineffective products, services and marketing plans.