Nothing drives me more insane than the lie that is still told about how important backlinks are!

Before I get too deep in this discussion, first let me explain what a backlink is and how it works. A backlink is a link on a website, forum, or anywhere on the Internet that links back to you. Simple enough, right? Well search engines come by, see that page that has you as a backlink, and takes note of it in how it formulates webpage relevancy and ranks websites, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) service and Alexa.

Many years ago, scammers and bad people noticed that if tons of backlinks were automatically created through software automation or hiring overseas people 20 cents per post (not exaggerating this one bit – big business in Phillipines, Vietnam and Indonesia) to make a post on the Internet with a backlink to what they are trying to manipulate on search engines.

If you remember years ago, if you typed in “dog boarding” since the holidays are coming up or “NFL sports scores” you would have to sift through Viagra, porn and virus infested websites.

Google fixed this by updating their Panda algorithm, which is how they rank pages for search results, by taking less of a score by the amount of backlinks you have and more of how relevant the backlinks were. For instance, if you are a company involved in computers and consulting like I am, Google would see my links on other computer forums, computer websites and other relevant webpages as being “better” than backlinks being generated by automation.

Many so-called “webpage designers” and “web consultants” hire these folks to manually create backlinks on popular websites, forums and discussion areas while many pay at least $50 per month (and upwards of thousands of dollars) per month to lease and run software on servers to spam the Internet full of backlinks through automated software programs to create massive amounts of backlinks. Unknowingly, some folks hire these people to create the backlinks for them by telling them that backlinks are how you get better search engine exposure and more results that list your website to visitors.

Absolutely wrong!

Guess what? If you hire, either knowingly or unknowingly, these folks and they create tons of automated backlinks for you – your website will be penalized by search engines, such as Google, and your website may be permanently banned from being listed on search engines!

Now many of these people will claim that “SEO costs money”. Absolute hogwash! Search engine optimization (SEO) does not cost money at all and is nothing more than an excuse for that person to get an additional fee or monthly fee from you to subcontract out backlink creation to a third party for next to nothing while pocketing the rest of YOUR money at the expense of YOUR website being banned from Google.

As for Fernandina Beach, I only know of one web design / consulting business and it would be wrong to name them but you could SEARCH AMELIA Island and find the company very easily who is engaging in this type of unethical behavior.

For instance, if you download and install the Alexa toolbar from Alexa’s website, you can see the amount of backlinks on a particular website. Now with this installed, you will see an “a icon” in a blue circle on the right hand side (well on Google Chrome web browser for me) and if you’re on a website, click it and it will give you information.

Alexa ranks websites with a number. Google, Facebook and YouTube are in the top 10 websites on the Internet. You can see the backlinks with the “sites linking in feature”.

Now if you see a potential web consulting / web design company soliciting you or your business about “SEO services”, with this Alexa toolbar, you can verify their claims. I would ask them if they have client websites that you can look at so you can see how good their work is. If they give you the links to the websites, check them out and verify them with the Alexa toolbar especially if this company says they offer search engine optimization / SEO services.

Also, if a client’s website is not ranked under 2,000,000 – this may be a potential problem. All my clients are ranked under 2,000,000 with little effort upon myself and I’ve seen some folks who pay $50 – $200 per month for “SEO” services without any results whatsoever. You type in what the company does into Google and the webpage is on page 4, which is such a rip off.

What to look for is:

• Article submission websites
• Forums
• Blogs with little or no content (plus they look weird)

All three of these examples are prime ways “SEO scammers” try to manipulate search engine results through automation and try to rip you off. If you see the company’s clients or even the company’s own website being involved in automated backlink creation – keep your money and run as fast as you can! If your website designer says something like “well SEO isn’t free and there’s a monthly cost involved” – RUN.

With that being said, I would like to offer you my services.

I do not engage in any kind of automated submission of links, backlinks or articles. I hate spam with a passion, since I’m a computer consultant, a good bit of my time is wasted cleaning up the mess these automated people create with their fake links, fake comments on websites and forums, and the aggravation a lot of people who were duped by these so-called companies into giving them money.

Unlike those folks, I create “organic” backlinks through manual article submission and manual social bookmarking rather than taking the easy and unethical way out of hiring somebody overseas or purchasing an unethical piece of software to do all this for me. Sure, this takes some time and does cost a little bit of money, but the $200 – $400 I may charge you in your bill along with the yearly cost to host your site and the design have no hidden fees like these guys who may manipulate you into believing that if you do not pay them, your website is going to go offline. If you keep paying them, your site will eventually be ranked less and less each month until it’s virtually disappeared from the Internet from a search engine penalty.