Giving SEOs a bad reputation
A few days ago I came across a service that at first site seemed legit. Then I started to read and everything fell apart. I’ll start of by showing you their main offer before I’ll dive a little into the details they are using to sell their crappy service.
There is nothing wrong with helping people get their sites index initially and even though I think that $24.99 would be a bit too high a price it might be because they promise that the site is indexed in 7 days or you’ll get your money back.
But that is where it ends and the crap begins. They try to sell you listing in directories. These directories will 99/100 cases not be worth anything because the good directories costs money (and can’t be covered with the $25 – exception is DMOZ but that is not an easy task).
What the crap is “Industry Leading Service” with “Advance Google listing process”? There is no such thing but unfortunately this sounds important and new people that come online don’t know this.
It is true that Google has 6.5 billion searches (if not more) per month but using it to sell a monthly $25 service is a dirty trick. That parameter is no more useful to a new user than the fact that a day has 24 hours.
All the way through their salesletter they are mentioning a lot of facts that people might already have heard in the television or have read in the paper but none of them has any relevance to the prospect.
It is a disgrace to the industry
I think it is such a bad taste to try to sell a useless service like this to new people coming online. They’ll take their money and provide next to nothing in return. Their customers will eventually leave them with a feeling that “those SEO experts are all scammers”.
If you know SEO I will encourage you to go read their complete salesletter (the link is nofollow, noindex).
What is your opinion on this? Ineedhits isn’t the only company out there selling these worthless services but they just happened to be the ones I came across. There are probably hundreds or thousands of scammers’ sites trying to sell similar services. Is it something that we should just ignore or can there be done something about it?
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Hi Mikael,
I’m the head of Product Development at ineedhits. I was just reading over your blog post and would like to clarify a few of the items you raised about our G-Boost service.
As you state, we do guarantee listing in Google in 7 days. So at only $24.99 it is good value, especially when you consider the cost of people’s time to do it themselves.
Any genuine SEO provider knows – you can’t buy your way into Google. We use our tried and tested best practice listing procedure (“advanced Google listing process” as you state) to get our clients included. If they’re not listed in 7 days – they get their money back ““ we take on the risk.
With regards to your comments about the directory links provided by the service, there are many free directories that offer genuine ranking value for SEO purposes (e.g. DMOZ, Jayde, Turnpike, Web World Index etc…).
We submit our clients websites to a range of directories every month to help site owners build up listings, and guarantee at least 5 new permanent listings every month ““ so again, much cheaper than doing it yourself.
We’ve been involved in the search marketing industry for over 12 years and hold strategic relationships with several major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, ExactSeek etc… – so I’m not sure your statement “Giving SEO a bad reputation” is entirely fair or honest!
I hope this helps to clear some of the confusion! If you have any questions feel free to contact me via marketingdept[at]ineedhits.com.
Thanks
Matthew
Product Development – ineedhits.com
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I can see that we agree that getting indexed for $24.95 is a fair price for beginners in the SEO arena.
However I think that is where we stop agreeing. I’m sure that you might be able to find 10-15 directories that will provide some value to a website owner but 5 valuable directories per month will leave you with hanging pretty quickly. DMOZ is great but unless you’re the editor of the category or know someone I can’t see how you can get a new site into it their directory within a few months.
The reason for my post is that (and it even makes is worse that you’ve been in the industry for 12 years) you are hyping your sales letter to an extreme that isn’t worthy of a serious company. Every SEO knows that linkbuilding through directories will only get you a small part of the way but yet you show pictures of #1 ranking, telling people that there are 6.5 billion searches on Google etc. etc. I think it is dishonest and an unfair way of getting new people to purchase your service.
Why not try to tell people what it is that you’ll be doing for them and what to really expect instead of hyping it to such an extreme?