Ten 24 Media

The search engine optimization industry has a huge problem - it’s plagued with snake oil salesmen.

“Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings”, “Submit Your Site To 10,000,000 SEARCH ENGINES”. In fact, just now I got a call from such a slinger. Here’s the Coles Notes of that conversation:

Con: Hello Sir. Is this Vagablond.com?
Me: Yes. How can I help you.
Con: Wow. This is a huge honor. I must say sir, you have an incredible site. Soooo…informative.

Ok…I know! I should have hung up here. But I wanted to hear what sort of crap he was going to feed me.

Me: Ok. How can I help you.
Con: Sir. Did you build this site yourself?
Me: With help from many others.
Con: You have an amazing site Sir. One of the best I have ever seen.
Me: Our site is for sale to the right buyer. Are you interested Sir?
Con: No No. But I can help you a great deal. Can you go to Google Sir. And type in the word “travel” in the search engine.
Me: Ok. I’ve done that.
Con: I cannot see your site Sir. And it’s proven that most visitors don’t go beyond the first page. We can guarantee to get your site on this first page instead of giving this succeess to your competitors.
Me: Oh. And how do you do that?
Con: Through our proprietary technology we’ve developed with a large team. We will also create multiple domains that contain your keywords.
Me: But that is against Google’s terms and conditions, multiple domains with the same content.
Con: That is only your interpretation Sir. I assure you that you only will have success.
Me: How much?
Con: Just $30 a month for up to 10 keywords of your choice.
Me: Travel, Casino, Wine, Microsoft, Google, ….
Me: Do you have some examples of clients you’ve had success with?
Con: Of course. Please go here on our web page. You see the sample reports. There you can see Ford, Boeing, JC Penny
Me: (I won’t tell you what I said to him from here on in)

Folks…if it sounds too good to be true - IT IS!