I stumbled over an extraordinary example of poor SEO ethics recently that I’m ashamed to admit was undertaken by a well known Aussie SEO house.

No this is not about using some black hat SEO technique, this is blatant abuse of a client’s site by the SEO service provider for their own purposes.

This well known Melbourne based internet marketing business had covertly planted a link farm in their client’s site which was feeding keyword aligned links back to other clients

If you’ve been involved in internet marketing for more than a minute, you know how important links are and just how hard they can be to secure. Incoming links that it is, not outgoing ones like this.

So in summary the situation is this:

• The SEO provider has created a hidden page that linked out to seven of their other clients sites.
• Net benefit for the client in question is nil
• Net gain for the SEO provider – Some free links that aid their other clients

BTW when I enquired, the client was unaware of this page and certainly had not approved it.

Before you mentally interject to suggest that this client probably benefited from seven similar links back in, there is no evidence of this. The link farm file date placed its last update at 2008, so it wasn’t a revenge attack linked to their recent loss of this clients business.

Where’s the return on investment for your now ex-client!?
Shame. Shame. Shame.

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