Hey, Robert. Well....it's not a scam, IF you want to have your listing show up higher on Google. The white hat way of doing that is negotiating good backlinks on reputable places (e.g. generating articles, adding listings) and having a clear strategy about anchor text, landing pages, on-page SEO, etc. etc. The black hat way is to hijack a bunch of sites and build pages on them that link to the client's site. For example, one of my Drupal clients (Drupal 5, from way back) turned his User settings to allow other people to create accounts without telling me. As a result, there were over 1000 users, each with their own "profile page" upon which they could write anything, and which would be indexed by Google robots. There were no links to these profile pages from the public site, so no way for my client to discover it was happening, unless he Googled himself: site:redhookcurryhouse.com I deleted all users, deleted all profile content, turned back to change the user settings (I know, that was in the wrong order), and discovered that in 2 minutes 5 new users with profiles had been created. All done with automation. Very clever! I'm punishing him by making it a flat HTML site (if he wants it to be Drupal again, he has to pay for a Drupal 7 upgrade. So, my short answer: Black Hat SEO works fine, and is worth the money if you need to go that route. -Bram On 8/23/2014 10:43 AM, Robert Heller wrote: > ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > ** If you did, we all thank you. > > > I've been getting sales pitches from SEO Marketing companies, both via > telephone (Robot calls mostly) and via E-Mail (and via my contact page on my > website). All with more or less the same basic pitch: "We can place you the > first page of Google searches..." or some variation on that theme. > > These companies charge something like $300-$500 / month (which is way outside > what I could afford). > > What *exactly* are these companies really doing (other than looking to pocket > a pile of *my* cash)? Some claim to be using a propriatory system -- whatever > that means. > > Note if I do a search for "Linux Administration North Quabbin" *my* website > shows up as the first and second results (at least with duckduckgo), so my > website can't be that bad as it is. I do get some business, maybe not vast > amounts, but I am not sure I could handle vast amounts of work anyway -- I am > a one-man operation and there are only so many hours in the day. I would need > to get more work than I could handle to cover the $300-$500 / month anyway -- > that is I would end up becoming a cash cow *for the SEO Marketing company* and > my net income would not be much more than it currently is! What would be the > point of that? > > Most of the pitches say that my website is not findable, but somehow these SEO > Marketing companies have found my website (is it a chicken or an egg?). What > are they doing: doing a search and then working backwards from the *last* page > of results? Or are they really finding my site easily enough and thinking > 'this might be an easy mark', since I might not be at the top of all of the > search results (or the search results for the searches they are doing). I > wonder: maybe my website is really good in that it looks like a bigger company > than I really am? > > Is this some sort of scam or what? It has all of the look and feel of a scam, > much like the credit card robot calls, which start with "This is your final > wanring about your credit card..." (and I *don't* have a credit card!). > -- GF Logo Bram Moreinis, Principal http://www.gamefacewebdesign.com (845)-750-2412 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20140824/051596ff/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: elogo.gif Type: image/gif Size: 15744 bytes Desc: http://gamefacewebdesign.com/ Url : http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20140824/051596ff/attachment.gif