SEO companies

[shiftins]

So prior to joining SEOmoz I have tried a few seo companies and had somewhat decent results. All of these companies did things like:

directory submissions
social bookmarking
social profiles
blog comments
article syndication
press release

and so forth. These things that they were doing worked and improved the rankings of my websites in the serps. After some time and research I figured out that all this stuff was easy to do and that I could do these things myself.

After joining SEOmoz I come to find that these types of links are not considered high quality because they are easy to acquire. Some of you may even say that they are the basis of a spammy link profile. My question is why would you not want to do these things if they work and all of your competition is using these strategies, including big name brand companies?

[shiftins]

Well some of my link profile has this work done already. Would it be a bad idea to add a little bit more then focus on building high quality links? I mean the worst that could happen is all of the spammy links would be devalued right?

[JamesNorquay]

Their is going to be no/ lower market for rubbish SEO services who only offer poor quality services. But in my eyes now is the best time for high quality services. People say link building is dead! Low quality link building is but high quality link building and out reach which is natural is in demand at the moment.

In regards to the original question, yes most of the services those SEO companies did for you are easy to do and they yield lower quality results, but in my eyes if you are a business owner you simply do not have the time to do link building, my advice would eb too look for a well known respected SEO company in your area.

[bronxpad]

Seo is a marathon not a sprint. Sprinters can get to page one fast but marathoners can go the distance. When it comes to your business succeeding with the major search engines it's better to take the advice of the Pros here on seomoz like EGOL, Marie and Francisco. I've followed there advice since joining a month ago and it has helped a lot.

[Francisco_Meza]

Here are my 2 cents. Yes they can work and "yes" I did it years ago and I did not get caught. I don't do it anymore. Here is the real reason I don't do it. Currently there are about 15 employees. "IF" I would have gamed the algorithm 1 year ago, then today there would have been 5 people laid off. I don't want my client to lay off anybody especially since many of them have kids and a mortgage.

This is the same reason I don't run Google Adwords to the max. Let's say that I get 20,000 unique visits per month coming from Adwords. If I am maxed out on acquiring traffic, then any decrease would mean downsizing. There are only so many people searching Google/Yahoo/Bing for keywords.

Instead I would want my traffic to be consistent and reliable so everybody can keep their jobs; including me.

[MarieHaynes]

Yup yup yup to what EGOL says.  I personally think there are going to be a lot fewer SEOs in the world very soon. With the latest algo updates, gone are the days when you could throw up a spammy link profile and rank a site.  Rather, SEOs are going to have to be smart and creative and actually find ways to get people to link to sites naturally.

There are still some tactics that are working such as guest posts, but I'm suspicious that even these will be closely scrutinized by Google soon.

[EGOL]

In the past few months, lots of website owners who have enjoyed success from these methods for years are now at much lower traffic levels in response to Google's Penguin update and other actions.  Those who have used keywords repetitively as anchor text seem to have particular problems.

So, although lots of people still use these methods, many are now afraid of them after seeing their business (or their colleague's business) lose website revenue and lay off their fulfillment staff.

Also, during the past year many people believe that these methods have become much less effective, and, many directories, article sites, and press release sites have lost rankings or even indexing.

That is the practical explanation.

To go philosophical, why should google honor these methods?  They do nothing to improve the webmaster's site or provide a service to the visitors.  So, a better and long term investment would be to build assets for the website.