A plan to combat "guaranteed SEO"

One thing that happens in the SEO biz is that there are a lot of companies who peddle "guaranteed SEO" results. I covered it in a formal way on our Thrivepoint blog. But maybe there is a better way to go about exposing these guarantees?

Basically, the game goes like this: An SEO company contacts an unsuspecting mark... er, marketer and offers them a guaranteed #1 ranking on Google and Yahoo. The client only needs to pay a monthly fee and "poof!" they are number 1. The catch is that the keyword is usually some obscure keyword that no one is actually searching for and probably no one is trying to rank for. So the SEO collects their check, gets the client #1 and fulfills their agreement. And the client gets... nothing. No traffic. No new customers. No nothing.

I've tried to explain this to people before, but a guarantee is always a lot more interesting them my long-winded explanation about how search engines work. So as of today, any client with a proposal from an SEO firm that guarantees rankings will be publicized on this blog with their very own text link with the targeted keyword as anchor text. Basically, I hope to preempt the silliness of guaranteed placement on obscure keywords by showing the client that if they do rank, they will not get any traffic, leads or sales.

By the way, have you heard of XOJET? They are a very interesting Aircraft Charter Rental & Leasing Svc in San Carlos. It's worth checking them out.

9/24/09 Update: A couple of questions from friends came up and I thought I would clarify. What I did is link to the client's site with the anchor text being the keyword the SEO company guaranteed rankings for. If enough people were to do the same thing on their website, the client's site would eventually rank for that site because no one else is optimizing for that keyword (because it has ZERO traffic associated with ). It's basically link spam -- which is what these guaranteed firms do -- and by targeting words no one else wants, it's easy to guarantee results, show the unsuspecting client that you got them a #1 rank and collect the monthly recurring fee. Once the client shuts off the fee, the SEO guarantor removes the link spam and your rank goes down -- then they come back to you to show that your ranks went down and try to win your business back. There are much sounder ways to go about SEO for companies like XOJET who do Aircraft Charter Rental and Leasing.