Recently I was speaking with a client that was telling me Google had called him.  At first, I wasn’t alarmed because they have been calling a lot of people trying to get them to advertise on their Adwords platform.   Next, he told me they wanted to optimize his website for the search engines with a six-month program.   Then they guaranteed he would be number one in the search engines for his words.  This set off all sorts of red flags to me, because Google does not perform search engine optimization for anyone, and there is not a legitimate SEO in the world that would promise you rankings.

Unethical search engine optimization companies are cold calling people more than ever.  Why?  They can now claim themselves as a “Google Certified Partner”.  Here is how it works.  Google has an automated program that allows you to become a “partner” after very little work.  Once completed you are entitled to certain benefits. One of those benefits is the title of “Google Certified Partner”.  

“Hi, this is Abha and I work with Google as a partner. How are you today?” is what you hear when they call you.  It almost sounds like they actually work for Google, doesn’t it?  Well, they don’t, and the fact that they unethically represent themselves during the initial call often indicates that their SEO practices are equally as misleading.  This is not a good sign, because if your SEO is using “shady” techniques, then you will be penalized and lose your website’s traffic. 

Many search engine optimizers, especially those out of foreign countries, actually still use old pieces of software to do SEO work for them.  The problem is that Google has wizened up to this software and now penalizes people that they think are using it.  One of the most common techniques is “blog spam”.  A while ago, it was possible for people to use a fifty-dollar program to spam blogs in order to get more backlinks to their clients’ websites.  Those backlinks would then give their clients higher rankings and everyone was happy.  Google caught onto this several years ago with an update in their algorithm called “penguin”.  Now, if Google sees that your website has many backlinks from “blog spam”, they will penalize your website or even ban you from Google.  It is likely that if an SEO company is going to be unethical on the phone, they are probably the type of company that still uses the SEO practices that can get you banned.


So, in short, do not even bother continuing the conversation with someone pretending to be from Google.  Google only calls to try to sell Adwords, but most often only to upsell if you already have an account.  If the person is not calling for this reason, you know right away that they are a fraud.   I spend a great deal of time helping clients recover from unethical SEO practices these days because of Fraudsters.  While I would love to work with you, I would prefer to help your business’s web traffic grow instead of trying to recover it after someone else completely killed it.

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