Hiring Unethical SEOs Can Be Dangerous

Submitted by: Colorado Springs SEO

Can Unethical SEO be Considered a Computer/Cybercrime?

The SEO space is still somewhat new. Most marketers and business owners don’t know much about how SEO works but one thing they do know, is they need better rankings and they need to hire a SEO Specialist to make better rankings happen. Unfortunately like most industries when there’s demand there’s doorway for unethical business practices that can end up costing you countless hours of headaches along side of substantial loss.

I’ve seen everything from SEO Sabotage, to SEO Blackmailing to holding businesses hostage in fear of a substantial financial and seo loss. These are all unethical and potentially illegal practices that some SEOs use to place fear of loss into clients who are considering some kind of business transition or transaction.

Here are just a few unethical SEO Tactics I’ve seen over the last 9 years:

Ranking Hijack:

The Google Rankings Hijack is one of the most dirty, effective and most commonly used tactics used by disgruntled SEOs. This particular tactic implys website ownership through Google Webmasters Tools as well as disallowing Googlebot from website access using the Robots.txt function. The Webmaster/SEO then manually request that the website be removed from Google search results from the Google Webmaster Tools CP which essentially wipes out the website in it’s entirety in a matter of seconds leaving a once well ranked web portal – non existent. Once the website is verified gone they will remove any trace of wrongdoing by eliminating the block code within Robots.txt and removing their personal Google Webmasters Tools Verification code.

Other unethical SEO Tactics are…

  • Remove links from prior link building efforts
  • Adding hidden text links
  • Linking to Bad Neighborhoods (i.e. Cealis /Virus Infected Websites)
  • Uploading Files Containing Virues
  • many other tactics implemented to attract heavy penalties from Google.

Sure these tactics are unethical but are they really a criminal offense? Read the Full Article here.