We would like to get your website on first page of Google

Increasingly I’m getting emails with the above mentioned somewhere in the email and really it’s getting annoying for oh so many reasons:

Spam

First there’s the fact it’s spam, yes spam is a problem that is likely to never go away but it doesn’t stop it being an annoyance.

Ethical

Some of these emails even say they only use ethical ‘white hat’ techniques. Apologies but spam is not an ethical form of marketing in my book so if you’re willing to do this I greatly doubt that the techniques you use for SEO are all above board.

Rankings

So they say that they can get me to the first page of Google, what exact keywords do they expect to get me to the first page for? For my full name I actually fill out the first 2 pages of Google with stuff relating to me, even if some are content scrappers.

Maybe they will get me to the first page for my job; web designer? Even if an SEO I respected told me they could do that I think I would tell them to fuck off. For such a generic term I’m pretty convinced the only way of ranking for that term would either take years with massive changes to my site, or some serious black hat techniques that will get me banned.

Research

Of course most spam is from people sending out via massive mailing lists so they have done no research on who they are spamming. If they had looked around my site for even a few minutes they might actually find I work for an SEO company. Hell I’ve even seen such emails arrive at work offering SEO services. So given the option between paying for someone to SEO my website or wandering into the SEO office and asking some questions I think I know which one I would prefer.

Even if I did go somewhere else for SEO I would probably be a rather dangerous client. Sure I don’t know everything but I’d be able to tell a when I’m being bull shitted.

Reputation

Currently it seems that the only spam I really get is for pen enlargement, adult videos, v-pills, viruses and SEO (I changed a couple of those, but I think you get the idea). SEO already gets a bad rap so being massive spammers won’t help some peoples opinion of the industry. It’s not like older industries like electricians and farmers spam you in hope of work. So why do some so called SEO companies think this is a worthwhile marketing method when it’s frequently associated with the advertising of utter crap?

Hopefully these companies won’t hang around for long as people become wiser to the pitfalls of the industry, in the meantime I’ll just keep pressing the delete key.