How do you like the title? Actually it all started when I posted a thread in 4 popular forums about the issues of myth and lies from SEM companies. Incredibly this topic became so popular that it received over 40 replies in forums and even made the Search Engine RoundTable blog.

I am simply proud of myself.

Just to recap … we had a SEM (search engine marketing) company visit our (non-SEM) company to pitch their services to us. This is a well known and popular company, so imagine my surprise when I heard the B.S. we were fed.

Here is the list and my response as well as additional feedback from the great people at the Search Engine forums.

• Google now offers Paid inclusion service in order for you to rank higher in their natural results. “It’s in BETA now and it’s free”.
• Yea … you confused Google with Yahoo … furthermore … there is no proof that Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion has any effect on the rankings.
• We have the best engineers with masters degrees in mathematics and thus they know what Google will do with their algo in the future.
• Complete B.S. as no one really knows this. We can all guess based on common sense and previous history, BUT you can not make it a selling statement.
• We will get your pages on Google Sitemaps and thus you’ll rank higher.
• Yea, right. Google site maps is for sites that either have thousands of pages and many of those pages do not get seen by the spiders, OR for any other reason, your pages do not get spidered and you want to show them to Google now.
• We have a huge staff of writers, SEOs, personnel, marketers … 100+ people.
• Listen … from my experience … the more people work in a company the more you’ll be disappointed. This greatly applies to SEO. I’ve found that some of the best SEO companies that provide good results have no more than 10 people.
• We speak to industry leaders and engineers (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Danny Sullivan…) and hence we get the information that not many other SEOs get.
• What these guys are saying is … we paid $2000 and attended a seminar that was offered to everyone who would pay. We took a picture with one of the engineers and now he’s our friend. I DO NOT CARE WHO YOU KNOW. I care about who knows you!
• We do only White Hat SEO. Our techniques??? We create content … for each state you sell in. Duplicate content? What’s that?
• Always ask about the exact techniques they’ll use. These guys mentioned creating content for each state. This was their big idea. If their strategy is to fool search engines, the only people you’ll fool is your self. One day Google will uncover the trick and you’re gone.
• We’ll submit your site to thousands of search engines and directories.
• Does this thing still work? I care only about 5 directories and a few local ones. Who needs 500?
• We’ll guarantee …….
• GUARANTEE !?!?!?! Run now!

 What’s worse is that this is a company that is out there on all the shows and magazines. Who gave us this info??? The Vice President of the company.