Hi, I’m Rob Weatherhead. You can find out more about me here, look me up on Twitter, LinkedIn or drop me a line using the contact form to the left.
Verified SEO: The Latest SEO Scam?
The SEO world joined forces this week in a bid to rid the world of a small slice of the SEO scamming world. Due to its reputation as a “dark” or “mystical” art the world of SEO is one which is littered with companies trying their best to scam innocent companies and individuals out of their hard earned money.
A small number of them however have decided that the best prey are the SEO companies themselves and by leveraging the naivety of their potential customers a way to make money out of SEO companies is to offer up accreditations, rankings or verifications to help them gain new customers. Great idea hey!? In theory yes, if these verifications had any substance behind them and weren’t based purely on commercial gain for the company providing the service.
One I have been aware of for a while is topseos.com. a company claiming to rank SEO companies on the service they provide and then supplies them with badges listing their rankings to use on their website and emails etc. I came across them a couple of years ago and thought it would be good to get the SEO company I work for reviewed and listed so we could use it in marketing collateral, after all, looking at the criteria we ticked all the boxes to rank well. So we contacted them to ask for a review and inclusion in their rankings and how we got included. Their response? “You need to pay” or to put more detail on it, you have to pay anything from £400 per month to £1800 a month to be considered for rankings. Hardly sounds impartial does it!
Seoconsultants.com is in the process of calling out topseosso I will happily leave them to it. But topseos is not the only one at it, and not the only one being called out.
The latest company to enter this market is Verified SEO. Apparently a group of “industry experts” who will gladly verify you are indeed a bonafied SEO professional all for $99 a month (previously $199). This week however the world of SEO decided enough is enough and challenged verified SEO (in the form of Rishi Lakhani) to prove they really are SEO industry experts. After all, if they were that good, we would have heard of them right? But the more the SEO community digs into the story behind verified SEO the less substance there appears to be behind their claims, and thus far, there has been no official response from the “industry experts” behind the project. I guess they are just another bunch of SEO snake oil salesmen looking to make a quick buck off unsuspecting companies.
Id like to lend me weight behind the campaign and proclaim, that I am proud that neither I, nor my company, is a verified SEO, or a top SEO!
Update:
Verified SEO, in the form of the founder Charles Preston, have now had their say in a comment stream which can be seen here. Charles’ argument is that Verified SEO is a legitimate service but one that was not thought out well enough. He says the service was not meant to be any form of scam, just a legitimate verification service for SEO providers. The service has since been discontinued after all of the controversy.