I had an interesting email exchange with someone last week that brought forth some very important issues I thought I'd share with you.

The original email went something like this:

"Can you increase the traffic to my site? Here's the URL. If you think you can, I might be interested in retaining you for your services."

My reply was very simple:

"I don't know what the current traffic to your site is, so there's no way for me to know if I think I can increase it."

So he sent me a ranking report. Not a traffic report, just a WPG ranking report. So I replied:

"You sent me a ranking report, but that still doesn't tell me how much traffic you receive, so I still can't say whether I think I can increase your traffic."

I found this little exchange interesting because the guy obviously understood that it was targeted traffic he was interested in, but because he was contacting an SEO, he assumed that rankings were the important measurement. (Either that or he just mixed up the word "ranking" with "traffic" in the first email.) At any rate, I decided to take a look at the ranking report, just for the heck of it. The site had obviously been "optimized" for many seemingly related phrases, and according to the reports, it was ranking very well for many of them.

I imagine what had happened with this guy is that his SEO company had done what they said they would do -- get him ranked highly for some specific keyword phrases -- but he was finding out that it wasn't bringing much traffic to his site. Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence. I've previously dubbed this "guinea pig SEO" because I like to say that my daughter's guinea pig could also get rankings for keyword phrases that nobody is searching for.

However, beyond the "guinea pig SEO" issues, there were other, more important things going on. The first was that the WPG report was run with Google as one of the engines automatically queried. This is specifically against Google's terms of service, and if they have any inkling that the owner or Webmaster of any particular site is running these reports (either WPG or any other software that doesn't go through the Google API) they can and do penalize or outright ban the site. I decided to mention this to Mr. Increase My Traffic, just in case he wasn't aware of this issue.

After spotting that, I decided to visit the site in question to see what else might be up. There was a large Flash animation and pretty much no other text on the home page. I was surprised that this page was ranking so well for the phrases I saw on the WPG report, and decided to check out the source code. Just as I suspected, there was some shady stuff going on there. The SEO had placed hidden links in the code to a number of his other clients' sites, as well as to his own "guinea pig SEO" firm, which most likely meant that the other clients' sites all had links back to this site. It also had overstuffed Title and Meta tags, as well as a hidden H1 tag with the main keyword phrase contained within it. Since the phrase in question actually had zero searches in the last 332 million search queries (according to Wordtracker), it obviously didn't take much to get this page to rank highly for it.

Of course, the same rankings could have been easily achieved without having to use deceptive SEO practices. It turns out there were only 24 pages in Google that even used that phrase in the Title tag (2 of those were from this particular site).

Anyway, after seeing all that, I felt it was my duty to inform the site owner of what was happening on his site. Because this site discussed things of a legal nature, it seemed even more important to let him know what was happening. He emailed me back right away and asked what he should do about the search engine spam. I wrote him the following:

"If you leave it, you run the risk of being banned. I doubt in your line of work that you want to project yourself as someone who attempts to deceive the search engines. It's true that it's not illegal, but many would argue that it is unethical. And if you were aware of what your SEO was doing, then of course that makes it even worse. But even if you didn't know, it's your site and your responsibility as far as the engines are concerned. If you get banned, going to them later and saying you didn't know isn't really going to help you.

"I would think that being associated with that SEO firm and the code they have on your page is not in your best interests. It appears that the spam is only on the front page of the site and could be easily removed. But they're going to need to remove your link that they're hiding on their other clients' sites also. Those might not get you in trouble, as anyone could hide links to other sites, but it's doubtful that the SEO will want to keep them up, and really, if I were you, I'd want them gone.

"Your next step would be to do some homework to find yourself a real SEO consultant who understands best practices and whose rates are within your budget. I assume you didn't pay much for the garbage you currently have (at least I hope you didn't), but a real SEO who doesn't use deceptive practices will probably cost you a lot more. That's how those companies stay in business; they're generally cheap because they don't have to do any real work. Just hide some links, hide some keyword stuffing and they're done. Works great until the stuff hits the fan and you're banned.

"You may want to spend some time at my forum, as there are many great SEO types who know what they're doing who hang out there to help. You might find someone good there who can clean up your current mess."

He wrote back to thank me for my "sage advice" but that's the last I heard of him. The spam is still on his site as of this moment. Hopefully, he's just taking his time seeking out a professional company to work with and it will all get cleaned up soon.

Jill