SEO Scams

The world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be tricky for companies new to the field. Unfortunately, many people and organizations take advantage of businesses and attempt to capitalize on their lack of SEO knowledge. Let’s discuss the most common SEO scams and fraudulent activities in digital marketing, as reviewed at the Marketing 2.0 Conference.

Types Of SEO Scam

Offenses

● Paid Reviews

● Automated Links

● Hidden Text

● Link Farms

Paid Reviews

Paid reviews are an unfortunately widespread practice wherein companies pay third-party websites or freelancers to create fake, glowing reviews of their products or services.

This activity artificially inflates a company's online presence, ranking its website higher on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Marketing 2.0 Conference shares that these reviews are often not just made up of copy-pasted praise but are also based on content from other websites and plagiarized from various sources, including competitors.

Automated Links

Automated link building allows companies to game the search engine algorithms and secure higher rankings for their website.

Marketing 2.0 Conference underlines that these automated links are spammed across a range of websites to create an artificial backlink structure, leading search engines to assume the website is popular and more credible than it is.

It is an unethical tactic that results in poor user experience and content, leading to websites receiving warnings or penalties from search engine companies.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is what technical SEO professionals employ to deceive search engine bots and manipulate their rankings.

This type of SEO scam works by inserting text in an HTML document that bots can only see. The hidden text is designed to trick bots into believing that a website has higher quality content and thus will receive a better ranking.

Marketing 2.0 Conference reveals that the risk is that search engine bots will eventually discover the hidden text and punish the website by demoting its ranking or imposing a penalty.

Link Farms

Marketing 2.0 Conference spotlights that link farms are another common SEO scam where a group of websites creates a reciprocal link exchange.

The main objective of this link exchange is to fool search engines into thinking that multiple websites are linked and, therefore, more valuable than other websites.

This fraudulent link exchange practice can cause Google and other search engines to penalize a website, completely removing it from the search engine index.