SEO Company Search Results - An Embarrassment to Google and the other Engines

SEO digest

One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. After all, if you're going to police the practice and claim that "white hat" techniques are effective and permissable while manipulative ones don't garner results, you've got to take the most caution on the results for those seeking SEO services. If you're not careful, and those who manipulate wind up ranking in top results for queries related to getting their sites and pages ranking, this could (nay, would) give the impression that manipulation is, indeed, par for the course.

It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search result at Google for the query "SEO Company:"

If, like me, you've run a lot of reports like this on a lot of domains, you've probably noticed that this almost never happens naturally. The homepage of companies that aren't called "SEO Company" don't usually accumulate anchor text that contains "SEO Company" - it's almost always indicative of spurious behavior.

SIGNAL 3: The links themselves usually have a story to tell. Let's look at a few of the ones passing the most value (in particular, those using "seo company" in their anchor text):

Yahoo! reports about 2X the number Linkscape does, but the samples look pretty much the same. Low quality directories all with external links that say "SEO Company." If this is the kind of SEO we should be performing for our clients to help them rank competitively (which is precisely what the engines suggest when they rank them so highly), why exactly do we work so hard on quality content and attracting links naturally?

BTW - Google's not the only with this issue:

That's Yahoo! above. SEOCompany.ca is, if I remember correctly, Bob Mutch's firm, and they do solid work and have earned a big following with the great lists of SEO tools and resoures they put out free to the community. I'm not sure what they did to tick off Google, but I see them ranking around #250, maybe because of geo-targeting to me in the US?

Live doesn't do a terrible job here (seo company SERPs at Live), although the first two results aren't geo-targeted very well and there's some other manipulative folks in the top 10. And poor Ask.com is also putting our friends at #1 (seo company SERPs at Ask).

Let me cut straight to the point. I don't have any problem with what NationalPositions.com is doing. They found a way to rank well, leveraged it and are now getting dozens, maybe hundreds of daily inquiries for SEO help from companies who want to emulate their success in their own markets. Where I struggle is with the engines claiming that SEO in this fashion doesn't work and shouldn't effective, but then rewarding this kind of behavior with clients who are now going to get and apply these exact same tactics. A relevant analogy might find the court system giving out win after win to attorneys pursuing frivolous lawsuits - propping up their background with winning records and thus ensuring that more needless cases enter the system.

I know web spam is hard. We actually tried to build a spam metric into Linkscape at launch and found it to be a real Mt. Everest sized problem. But after 10+ years in the game, to find Google, the leader in this arena, giving sitelinks on results like these just doesn't sit well with me, and it shouldn't sit well with anyone else who employs best practices in white hat SEO.

p.s. If you're planning to report web spam of your own in the search engines, Google likes to receive it from your Webmaster Tools account, Yahoo! appreciates it at their Site Explorer Suggestions Center and Microsoft/Live has a spiffy forum. Many in the SEO sphere have found that, perplexingly, spam gets dealt with fastest when it's blogged about - making sites like YOUmoz and Sphinn havens for this activity.

p.p.s. No, SEOmoz is not trying to rank for "SEO Company" and yes, there are some great results that could show up in those SERPs - like:

• Jim Boykin's SEO Company (WeBuildPages), who has a remarkable track record with success, though they are quire expensive.
• Wil Reynolds and the excellent SEO Company, Thinkseer.
• Jessie Stricchiola's San Francisco SEO Company, Alchemist Media.
• Matt Foster's excellent SEO Company, ArteWorks.
• A fairly decent, if simplistic article from Yahoo! on When to Hire an SEO Company.
• Another good piece by Scott Buresh on Lockergnome about Using an SEO Company.
• And, of course, anyone on our extensive list of recommended SEO Companies.

Just trying to illustrate that it's not a vast wasteland of results - there's good stuff that could be showing for that query.

www.seomoz.org

published @ October 27, 2008