Sphinn - What happened to ethics? SEOs that Mislead Clients

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What happened to ethics? SEOs that Mislead Clients

Went Hot: September 19, 2007 - 2:26 pm
Posted By: bhancock 655 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com)
Category: SEO

A breakdown of areas where I have personally seen a lack of ethics in our industry. Most of these tend to happen in agencies, especially the ones that have grown by the largest percentage in the past few years. Unfortunately these things happen in any fast growing industry... :(

7 Comments

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from DarrellLong 655 days ago #

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wow I think your definitely on point with this post. The only thing that I also have noticed is that with larger "Agency" type firms they tend to have a cookie cutter strategy for every client. I always use the sheep herding analogy when talking about that. We all know that no two strategies are the same but yet time and time again we see this happening. Great Article :)

from planetc1 655 days ago #

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Unfortunately these are the kinds of firms that cold call small businesses regularly. I get at least a call per week from some company offering "top results." Good to continue seeing this topic addressed.

from g1smd 655 days ago #

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Ethics. Almost the least talked about subject. Only the sixth time it has been mentioned in any form here. You've scratched the surface with the most obvious. But it cuts both ways, some clients want someone to spam for them and don't understand what real SEO is all about. Educating clients is as important as educating the next wave of people starting out in SEO.

from drmadcow 655 days ago #

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Sitting at #1 for SEO Services on Google we get a lot of traffic from new clients. I'd wager around 40% of all the new clients that contact us have had bad experiences with past SEO firms!

from planetc1 655 days ago #

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Just look at the types of companies doing PPC around that term, a bad experience is not surprising.

from JstaTad 655 days ago #

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We do a lot of work for other agencies that "white label" our services and pass it off as their own. But we tell the agencies up front that we won't lie about our contractual relationship and let it be known that we are always one Google search away on our names from finding out who we really are.

It's been somewhat lucrative for us and "ethically" I don't think its that big of a deal... At some point the "secret" always comes out of "who's who".

from bhancock 654 days ago #

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Thanks for all of the comments guys, and also for the blog link Darrell.

Regarding the comment from g1smd - I scratched the surface with the most obvious? I don't know if all of these things were the most obvious, they certainly weren't obvious to the clients that fell victim to these tactics.

As far your mention of ethics going both ways, I definitely agree with that. While working at a large agency that had some of the biggest media companies as clients, I was shocked to get word that one client had to 'make numbers' this month and wanted a certain level of traffic - by any means necessary! I forget the actual number, but it was a huge number of visitors in something like a 1.5 week time frame. Being a media site, they were not specifically selling anything like products or services and merely wanted 'eyeballs' to go into their monthly report. We wound up giving the client what they wanted...

It's a crazy world out there! :)