SEO professionals often get collective black eye for the wrongdoing of a few SEO scammers. This is an unfortunate fact, because many SEO professionals are doing a wonderful job for their clients. Unfortunately, many business and website owners are clueless about SEO industry and the easily accept the service of fly by night SEO firms that seek only to steal the money of their clients. Many price-sensitive small businesses are particularly vulnerable to scam attempts, because they will easily accept the lowest offer. Shady firms will never work hard and get you genuine results for that amount of money. In many cases, their SEO project will give you quick, temporary results by using various unacceptable tactics that may ruin your credibility.

Eventually, shady SEO firm will disappear into thin air, while snatching your money away and they will escape unscathed. Illegal SEO methods will leave your website with negative reputation and reduced ranking in search results. Things can be worse if your website is de-indexed completely and not listed in Google or any other major websites. It would be a bad thing, if you need to re-start your online business from scratch again, with new domain name and website. Before working with a SEO firm, it is important to check their proposals and sales materials. You also need to learn more about SEO procedure, so you won’t be easily fooled. Ask a lot of questions and don’t take decision immediately. If you are unsure about their arguments, you can share them in various SEO forums to know whether these SEO professionals are honest and genuine.

It is a common fact that we also need that we have the copyright for all the content and material on our website. We should check this factor before we make any content go public. If someone finds out that you have stolen a content, you can get reported or at least lose much of your credibility. In some cases, the original owner of the content could sue you, which could be quite costly financially. Copyscape is a partially free service that allows you to monitor your website for inadvertent usage of copyrighted materials. You will know whether a piece of content has been published previously in other websites. You need to perform regular searches of your content with the same tool to make sure that your content hasn’t been reused by others.

In many cases, ethical SEO practitioners tend to stick together, although they are actually competitors. They realize that there’s plenty of business for honest SEO service and it’s in their best interest to ensure that clients are able to work with honest professionals. It is important for you to find a local association of SEO professionals in your area, because they tend to be quite honest compared to others. In many cases, you seek to sue any bad SEO professional out there, but most of the time you’ll realize it’s worth your time and money, because your goal is to make sure that your company continues to grow.