We receive thousands of phone calls, emails, link building questions and listing requests every year about SEO and link building techniques. Eighty percent or more of the people contacting us have terribly wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples, and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Hopefully, you will find useful SEO information that will help your company grow and increase your profits.
Many people phone our company saying, "I need low cost SEO, low quality backlinks, and tons of cheap links."
I respond, "Why?".... They say, "I want to out rank my competitors."
They think it is a pure numbers game, all links are equal and you get more and you win. This is the wrong link building strategy, and these "cheap low quality techniques" will cause your website to be penalized by Google.
These people want fast outstanding results; they want to be #1 for competitive keyword phrases in 1-5 months. Most people still do not understand that Google has penalized almost all of these cheap, crappy links and many people still do not even realize to vary their anchor text. So the fastest way to be penalized by Google is to put up 1000+ low quality links on crappy websites and low quality Directories.
Important Note: "If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site." - Matt Cutts of Google
Then use the exact same anchor text for all these poor quality backlinks. People who do this might as well just email Google and say "please penalize my site, I am a dumb-ass and I deserve to be penalized."
You need and want to be on Top Quality Sites and Directories.
I reply, "You do not understand how search engine optimization works, you need to look at this as a long term investment that you will be making as long as you are in business. Good ranking results take at least 6-12 months to achieve. Highly competitive keywords may take several years of SEO work and high quality merit based link building. Then you have to maintain all this work forever or you will lose the top rankings you worked so hard to achieve. Please remember your competitors are also working hard on their SEO and want to outrank you."
More on Link Building
Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. Google now gives thousands of web site owners penalties for these low quality backlinks.
Please watch this video by Matt Cutts of Google:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s
Google implemented much stricter spam algorithms in 2014- 2015, and really turned the screws on low quality SEO businesses, however they also increased the importance of sites that have higher editorial standards.
Also it is more important than ever to keep high quality long (many years) aged backlinks. If you lose our well-aged backlinks Google can really punish you and drop your rankings significantly and even worse you cannot replace these long aged backlinks, and you have to start all over again from the beginning.
The following article and video has useful information that I agree with about 85%. I have ways of enhancing what this gentleman states in his outstanding video:
moz.com/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday
Cyrus Shepard - I feel your pain! It's difficult to convince inexperienced clients to invest in high value, future-proof link building - especially when they are spammed everyday with emails promising top 10 rankings for $49/month.
Google sees all these SEO improvements we have done for you and when they see this stopping and going away Google marks your site as a "Devious website" that Google should not trust (suspicious unnatural activities) , and may filter and penalize you.
Then website owners hire a new SEO Company and this makes it even worse. E.g. Google sees: up, down, up, down ... all these changes, unnatural activities, and lack of stability is detected by Google. This is not our fault, as we cannot continue doing work for you for free. This is a bad consequence of not staying with SEO long term. Web site owners should choose one SEO Company and stay with them for many years to achieve the best results.
We see this over and over again and we warn clients that they are harming themselves with Google perhaps long term if they do not have a long term commitment to SEO.
Once Google marks your web site as a "Devious website" it is very difficult to recover, some web site owners never recover from this mistake of thinking you can turn SEO on and off without any negative consequences.
I have many people who phone me 1-2 years after I talk with them and say:
"Tom I wish I would have listened and followed your advice, and since I did not follow your SEO advice I have had terrible results."
Based on my 15+ years of fantastic SEO results I am one of the top SEO experts in the world. I am also modest J→htpcompany.com/gototom_tom_forrest.htm.
I will not even respect any other person that claims to be a SEO expert unless they can prove to me that they have achieved top rankings for many years for tough competitive keyword phrases. I often tell people that claim they are SEO experts to show me proof of their outstanding results. Most people have no proof of any top ranking results on Google. One quick way to find out the truth from people is to have them show a top ranking for their own company, as it is easy to claim you made Ford, Amazon, Boeing, etc. #1. How could you ever verify these claims?
If you are a newer SEO person and want to try to rank for important keywords, I suggest staying away from the keywords "SEO Company" as I used to be #1 for this for 5 years and it just brings too much attention and potential problems from Google. It is better to stay off Google's radar screen if possible.
One of the most important reasons I have had such outstanding long term success for our clients is that I am a long term thinker. We follow all Google guidelines and have had the same merit based backlinks in place for our clients for over ten years. Google loves this.
