I have been looking into hiring an SEO company to sort out our site because
we get very little in the way of search engine traffic. Our visitors mainly
come from recommendations by existing clients.

In this month's edition of Revolution, BigMouthMedia spent a huge chunk of
money being highly sanctimonious about ethical search optimisation.
Impressed by this, I thought I would do some investigation to see if they
are as good as their word...

They quote Google in their booklet, while talking about ethics of your SEO
agency saying alarm bells should ring if... "Your SEO provider puts links
into their other clients on doorway pages."

BMM put links into themselves on every page they build. On their smaller
pages, this is a visible "Search Engine Optimisation by Big Mouth Media"
tag, with a clickable link. They also list themselves, with a URL in the
pages META DATA. This is free advertising for bigmouth, and greatly improves
their ranking for "Search Engine Optimisation" it appears to do nothing for
the client at all.

On their larger clients, they omit the link at the base of the page, but
still place META information with a URL in the META content of the pages.
Unless this has been explicitly agreed with the client, this is highly
unethical behaviour. Indeed, performing the following search on Google...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=seo-provider+bigmouthmedia&b...
rch

...lists Alitalia. This search has nothing to do with Alitalia, is in
existence purely because BMM placed themselves in the pages META content and
I severely doubt Alitalia are aware of this listing, let alone happy about
it. There is even a broken TITLE tag that messes up the page rendering.

On the issue of unethical linking, if you go to Google, and do the following
search...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=site%3Asearch.bigmo...
a.com&btnG=Search

...you will see that there are 30,500 results. This looks very much like
search engine spamming, especially when a similar query...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=site%3Asearch.yahoo...

...only lists 4,730 results.

BMM's own search page outstripping Yahoo's search page in terms of this
volume of listing is concerning to say the least. It would be interesting to
see why BMM state this to be the case.

Try the following experiment.

Go to the BMM search page (http://search.bigmouthmedia.com), do a search on
anything. You will get a list of 'elated suggested search terms. Many of
these suggested related search terms are irrelevant and unrelated to the
search you have just made, some of which have no documents to match. Every
one of these that you go to returns another 20 suggested terms. There are
lots of common terms in this list, common in every page. This appears to be
there only for the benefit of search engines.

Apart from building a huge internal web for search engines to browse (it is
difficult to believe that any of these suggested terms exist for the user's
benefit), this results in a huge web with lots of pages containing links
with keywords in them, that link to pages with the keyword in them, creating
a cluster of documents on a site with specific keyword, artificially upping
the relevancy of that site for those keywords.

This appears to operate in direct contradiction to Google's guidelines
(regarding building pages for search engines rather than users). Their
linking back to themselves from client sites, and this inter-site linking
also appears to be in direct contradiction with Google's guidelines.

It would appear that either this is an unlikely accident by people who do
not understand search engines, or is highly questionable practice by people
who do understand search engines.

It is also interesting to note, that despite their mentioning the links to
watch out for in their booklet, and Google's guidelines, they advocate
getting as many in and outbound links as possible.

See [22] on
http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/the_ten_commandments_of_se...

It seems that this company does not practise what they preach.

Does anyone have any recommendations for SEO companies that stick to the
search engine's guidelines. Our site may not make us rich but it does pay
the bills at the end of the month; getting it banned for 'questionable
practises' is not something I am eager to do. Is this type of behaviour
typical of SEO companies? Or are BMM just a bad example who can afford the
glossy adverts?

Replies and advice would be gratefully received.

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