Sunday, June 22, 2008

What about S.E.O. frauds?

There are many swindlers called "web marketers" or just "advertisers" who are using my published portfolio to search for victims. This is not something that makes me harm because i use to train my customers regarding the way search engines rank their results and the way crawler's so-called democracy works (google loves the term "democracy" describing googlebot's methodology). But every rule has his exceptions as we say in Greece:

Yesterday one of my clients asked me to transfer his website to another company who promised that "his website can reach the top position in Google's results only by paying some euros in advance to make some SEO". I already knew the new company's methodology regarding SEO and this had many "trendy tricks" such as making spam webpages full os spam keywords and links, spam entry pages, invisible/hidden keywords etc. So what should i do? My first thought was to explain him that the new company is full of fraud and that google sooner or later will ban his website. But this should not be the right thing for me to do...

When a naive client "decides" to become a victim of a fraudulent company, an honest professional could not save him because:

1) The naive client will think that the honest professional is telling lies as the fraudulent company seems better than him (the honest professional is very very jealous indeed!)
2) The honest professional is not the naive client's father or teacher to protect him. He just tells his opinion sometimes and consults client in a very specific way. The honest professional cannot patronise his customer or even make him more intelligent.

So, my second and last thought about my naive client was "let him go". I won't try to explain him again the way crawlers work. He is naive afterall. One of my favorite philosophers was Bertrand Russell. In his "liberal decalogue" he said:

"Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."

i sould transform it a little for honest professionals:

"Do not feel guilty of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool is responsible for his stupidity."