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You sell stuff online? Awesome. You have a great product, provide great service, top notch post-sale support, yadda, yadda, yadda. But the problem is you need traffic? Yesterday. What do you do?

You receive this poorly written email, “I RANK YOU #1 GOOGLE”. You’re intrigued. You imagine being at the top of the Google food chain and all the free traffic that will pour in. You take out your calculator and do some quick math: if I can get “x” amount of traffic I’ll make “y” amount of sales and be a millionaire in “z” amount of time. At this rate, I’ll be acquired by Facebook for $10 billion, oh my mom will be so proud. Right?

I hate to burst your bubble. Believe me, I’m the most optimistic blogger you’ll encounter today, but you’ve assumed something. And you know what they say about assumptions right? Que Samual L. Jackson.

You Can’t Game Google

You assume that you can game Google. Sure in the past before the Panda and Penguin updates, SEO’s could game Google to an extent. But not anymore. And you already know this. You bought that SEO service from that company in a faraway land that pumped your site full of black hat backlinks and now your Google rankings (and income) have tanked. You are scared for your life.

You decide you know what I need “professional” help. I can’t expect to pay $20 and be ranked at the top of Google, what they only hire world class Ph.D’s, programmers, and philosophers that debate this stuff all day, I can outsmart them by just spending a little more. I’ll throw money at the problem to make it go away. You decide to hire a real SEO person. You go on a freelancer site and post this job.

At first you’re excited that you’re getting tons of bids. You’re receiving pm’s telling you they can make your site #1 in Google for $150, $100, $80, $50, $30! Wow, clearly these people know what they’re doing. They have glowing reviews. Income. Profile pictures! You start to feel like a tycoon again. Your business will beat Google in no time. Who cares if Google’s revenue is in the MULTIPLE BILLIONS and that in order for them to continue to make money they have to make sure the search results are not being manipulated. Who cares about how Google makes money right? It doesn’t matter to you. You’re your own boss. You don’t follow the money, the money follows you!

That is why you only pay for results.

That’s why you figure: if they’re really an experienced SEO, they should be able to rank my site within the top 10 of search listings. And they should be compensated generously ($200 or so), but they will only be paid half. The other half they will receive when they are able to rank my site within the top 5. It’s only fair right?

No SEO Can Guarantee Rankings

First of all, to get rankings take time. It could be months, it could be years. No one is going to wait this long to be paid peanuts. What will probably end up happening is that you hire someone for $100, they hit your site with a billion forum links and you never hear from them again. On the next Google update, your site falls further in rankings and you’ll close up shop. I don’t want this to happen to you, you seem like a good guy with a good company.

Secondly, if anyone could guarantee getting your site ranked within the top 10 for a number of keywords, do you think they would be selling their services on freelance websites? Wouldn’t they be able to rank in Google for SEO services? Wouldn’t they have their own company selling whatever, since they can rank whatever at the top? They could create a site called Fazebook and have it outrank Facebook and create a new social networking site that makes trillions! It’s possible to outrank anyone right?

Seriously think about this. You obviously are familiar with black hat techniques as you specified quite rightly all the possible Darth Vader approved back linking methods. If these methods are off the table, what is a guy being paid $200 going to do? Get you a link on CNN? What are you expecting? You certainly have heard the saying, “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys”. I don’t want you to think this is a money issue, “Oh then I’ll pay $2,000 to get my site ranked” won’t work either. Sure you’re going to need lots of money to get your site where it needs to be, but you can’t pay for great links (Think CNN, local newspapers, social media). You have to hire someone that knows how to put together a marketing campaign that will get this kind of attention. And that’s going to cost more than $200 and the results wont be promised.

Disclaimer: I don’t want to come off knocking freelance websites, I think they are good for hiring for certain jobs but are really horrible for hiring for jobs like this. What bugs me so much about this particular case is that the business owner knows about black hat link building and yet is looking to hire storm troopers.