Shady Web Marketing Tactics by Companies With Big Reputation.
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Article by Lisa D. Myers Get Special Price” to Appear in Google Maps, Now! captured my attention. Lisa wrote about company from Norway which offered her friend to submit business in Google Maps. As we know, Google doesn’t offer any featured, paid, express, sponsored submissions but some companies still use shady tactics trying to sell free service to business owners who are not too savvy in technology and web marketing. Working in advertising industry for many years I saw a lot of examples when companies with big names try to cheat and add “extra” services to their bill. It raise my eyebrows and make me laugh when some sales agent call or come to my office trying to sell me something with hopes that I still live in 1986.
The most unique and sometimes funny tactics I met:
We’ll keep meta tags on your website for $1000 / month!
Yacht dealer from New England hired me to help with SEO and I noticed right away that website doesn’t have meta tags. I called their CMS (content management) provider, apparently multinational company, and asked why meta tags is missing and there is no way to access FTP or add them through their content management. Representative on the phone told me that it will cost $1000 / month to activate meta tags option on a website. Holly crap! How come I never came up first with this “genius” idea”!
It will cost you $300 to sign up with Google Analytics.
Same story, I called on behalf of my client to their web design company to get FTP access. Of course they did not want to give it to me asking why I need it. I told that we need to add Google Analytics on a website to track traffic from TV commercials. Representative told me that it will cost $300 to add Google code on a website or $500 if they create Google Analytics account (extra time consuming service).
Google will ban your site if you stop paying me for SEO.
Doing newspaper advertising services for one of my clients I noticed that their site has poor rankings on Google while they pay some SEO company $700 each month. Checking backlinks I found nothing but 1 submission in Yahoo Directory and 5-7 natural links from old news stories and sites like Alexa or AboutUs which link almost every site in the world. Whole site was filled with SEO mistakes like long url’s, duplicate content, random meta tags, etc. I suggested them not to pay $700 and save money for something else. SEO guy called us and told that their site indexed by Google only because his “unique SEO techniques” and site will be banned from search engines if they stop paying. Later I found that the same guy was hanging around my clients talking s**t about me and my services.
P.S. All examples above was applied by big companies with big names. In marketing many firms provide one service they are good at but they always try to put “extras” to your monthly bill. It is like car dealers, when you buying a car they always try to sell you some $159.99 cleaning product which cost no more than $20 in department store. I recommend to use SEO company for SEO, design company for design, printing company to print stuff.
