What Services NOT to Buy For Your SEO
If you’re just trying to rank your site and you come across offers to help you do precisely that for a measly fee of $299 (or a lot more) it can be hard to know what to do. After all, not all of us are exactly up to date on what’s working presently in the search engines, and it can be quite easy to take these people up on their offers.
The bad news here is that what worked last year may not work now, and you have no way of easily knowing that. These companies have vested interests, and offering you services is how they keep the doors open. You need to simply make sure you’re not doing something that can hurt you, and maybe help.
So instead of raise the white flag of surrender, let’s take note of 5 SEO services we know no longer work, so you don’t spend any of your precious marketing budget on them.
5 SEO Services to Skip
- Yelp, Yellow Pages and Yext – I’m tempted to say anything that begins with “Y”, but I can’t bring myself to add Yahoo. (Yet) All of these companies purport to help raise your local rankings in the search engines, but you can do anything they do for free, and avoid the negatives associated with each. Yelp especially has run into many problems. Any review sites can easily fall from grace so beware.
- Any search engine submission service – Most search engines, Google especially, PREFER to find your pages on their own by crawling them. Being sure you create relevant and timely content, and sharing it socially does all they want to do for you and more.
- Spun content to oodles of pages – Since we all know that Content is King, many kings would be good, right? Not so much. The practice of taking your articles or blog posts, spinning the holy mother out of it, and submitting it all over the web was the basis for the recent Penguin update.
- Link farms – Creating linkwheels and link pyramids worked like a dream for a long time. To have success with this now, you need to be smarter than Google. If you are, proceed with glee!
- Buying backlinks – Purchasing backlinks, particularly run of site links, are easily discoverable by Google, who will slap your site silly. These days, getting legitimate backlinks is easier than ever, so why risk it?
