Dangers of using paid SEO services

Most of us, eventually, stumble upon such services. For only $149.99 a month, you can get dofollow back-links from high page ranking sites, they would submit your site to hundreds of web directories, your articles would be spun and submitted to hundreds of article directories, etc...

While you could do a lot of that stuff on your own (and for free), you would never have enough time to do so. So, people started paying for all those link wheels, link pyramids and other link geometric shapes...

In time, many paid SEO services started using copied, spun and computer generated content to populate sites. That was the best way to avoid “link-farm” label, and keep the page rank.

Google Panda update introduced penalty for such content. Sites hosting such spun, copied and low quality texts got named “content-farms” and search engine semantic analysis became a reality. As a side effect, many revenue sharing sites got slapped and lost their rankings.

Fortunately, most of the revenue sharing sites quickly reeled and started monitoring content quality and climbing out of the Google sinner’s pit. New, post-Panda sites like Wizzley implemented constant content quality monitoring and it showed that revenue sharing could still be success as long as rules of the game are observed.

BuildMyRank created large network of high Page Ranking blogs. All the blogs in the network produced original content by high quality writers so it was not obvious that they were a part of a big link-building network.

Customers of BuildMyRank were paying a monthly fee to have access to their network where they could submit original articles with a back link in each. Once the article was in the system, it ended up submitted to one of the high Page Ranked sites in their network.

This solution worked great until Google started investigating more than just the site’s content.

In the Google’s war on SEO and SERPs manipulation, algorithms were not enough. So, Google decided that humans are necessary ingredient in determining real quality and relevance of sites. Those official Google “quality raters” could notice what algorithms could not. At least, they could see the adverts for BuildMyRank services.

I am making a guess here but it seems reasonable that Google has some kind of Intelligence department to analyze and interpret collected data as well as work on improving algorithms for automated analysis. Well, for them, it was quite simple to map the entire BuildMyRank blog network as well as all the sites using the same.

Since both selling and buying links was prohibited practice from the early days of SEO, Google decided to make an example of BuildMyRank.

In the case of BuildMyRank, as an example and warning to everybody else, Google decided to wipe it out of business.

In a single update, Google completely de-indexed all of the sites from their network. All the sites using the service lost those expensive back-links and BuildMyRank was forced to close the shop.

There are many quality books on Internet marketing that will help you run the SEO for yourself and on your own. Stay suspicious of various gurus offering a quick fix. You are your best and most reliable worker.

I do not consider it wrong to pay for SEO services. However, make sure that you know what you are getting into. Immediate results often mean “black-hat” and “bending the rules.” If you wish your site to have any kind of bright future, stay clear of those.

There are companies out there that can create a successful and positive marketing campaign for your site. Using proven and acceptable methods of link building, social media campaign and promotion, those companies can work wonders.