Reports surfacing in forums and newsletters around the Internet clearly demonstrate how certain companies resort to spamming the search engines while seeking better rankings. or that it’s important to hire only “ethical SEO consultants” or “ethical search engine marketers”. Since the use of subversive optimization strategies will be likely to cause dire results in the long run, the real issue is telling apart genuine SEO professionals from people who care about nothing but easy profit. This is true in every industry, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEO Company (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.
Prospective clients are known to sometimes bear an unhealthy stance towards search engine optimization, as result of information they’ve read somewhere else. What would you do if one such misinformed customer asked for something like a set of 10 entry domains liking their website. On the other hand, they insist that you do not “mess” with their website; all they’d be interested in is to develop a series of doorway domains.
This is a deceptive strategy because it tricks search engines into cataloguing hollow domains, just because the package is bound via sitemap to a link in the actual homepage of the customer’s website. So, as visitors find one of the doorway pages through the search engines, they’re offered nothing but a chance to make redundant clicks before they’re allowed to access the actual website they’re looking for. In this scenario, you’d have to make an important decision: compromise what you know is right and just service the customer, or try to convince him that such a strategy would not be a good option for optimizing his website? Granted, it’s not as if creating those pages would be necessarily considered unethical. What it there was a meaningful amount of relevant pages within the actual website? Once it gets down to it, the creation of those doorway pages would be nothing but a waste time; what the customer really needs is something much simpler: the optimization of the current content with appropriate search keywords.
Whenever dealing with this kind of customers, I always try to persuade them how wrong, pointless and ineffective their chosen strategy would be. Should I fail in doing so, I won’t hesitate to turn down the client. It may sound hard to yield the solid profit that would originate from such a simple job. On top of everything, it would be more than simple to just provide the client with his exact request…the client would likely be happy he’d get what he wanted? Self-justification would have come extremely easy, as you probably realize. But if you’re interested in being a professional SEO consultant, it’s very important doing what you know is right. If upholding your integrity as SEO consultant means losing such clients, it’s actually a small price to pay.
There will be other jobs and there will be other clients that appreciate your looking out for their site’s long-term well-being. You may lose some money on the short run from turning down this kind of customer… but on the long run, it’ll more than pay off. You can bank on it!
