The SEM Scam Sales Pitch
www.clickz.com: "The SEM Scam Sales PitchSearch Engine Marketing BY P.J. Fusco
Reviews a new SEM outfit and concludes: "their new, "time-tested" system of "domain-name funneling." Basically, his company would build several hundred pages on as series of domains, owned and managed by them, to "drive phenomenal volumes" of search engine traffic to different pages on our site by way of redirects that were "completely invisible" to the search engines. That's how he could "guarantee" more search engine traffic for the site.
I asked if the guarantee included a money-back option.
The SEM group was offering to create a bunch of sub-domains on its "page-rank-worthy domains," with our trademarked brand names in part of the file structure. Unwitting search engine users would be funneled to irrelevant pages that appear to be relevant for popular search queries. Of course, the SEM group would do this in such a way the search engines wouldn't de-index our site for spam penalties.
This is one of the more common SEM scams of late. It will eventually bury a legitimate business on the Web. Google calls it "shadow domains"; I call it "poor man's cloaking." No matter what you call it, building doorway pages to misdirect unqualified search engine traffic to a site is never a good idea -- unless your primary business line is ad scraping.
The moral of this story is threefold: First, be very wary of signing on with an SEM group that won't help you speak with its clients because they want to "protect their privacy." Second, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. Don't fall for "guarantees" that deliver irrelevant search traffic by spamming the search engines. Finally, whenever possible, schedule your vacation in tandem with your boss so you're not stuck with his drudge work."
posted by Jen @ 6:08 AM
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