As many of us know, the SEO industry on the whole is massively exploited and is very much open to exploitation and there has been some real extreme cases over the years. There are, however, some real bandits that stick in our minds like glue and we'd like to serve you up our famous 5.

So let the disgraceful list begin.

5) The Link Millionaire - Ok, so we know that inbound links are one of the most influential weighted factors when it comes to where you rank on major search engines, so it stands to reason, people selling links can make some serious money. One individual from Texas in the USA cetainly made some money - in fact, an estimated $12,000,000 was made by the 19 year old link entrepreneur. Although, his techniques weren't exactly 'kosher'. Sam Droysden created a blog network of over 1.2 million websites taking him a little over 3 years and then went on to sell links on the blogs. The problem is, once you had paid for your link placement it would disappear a day later - there was no way of asking for a refund. The links were described as 'HQ' links, guaranteeing your link will be the only link on the page, which you were, but you'd soon disappear a day later. Sam Droysden was later charged with 11 counts of fraud, was forced to pay back $9,000,000 in compensation to numerous individuals and companies - not to mention was jailed for 2 years.

4) Your Making A Fake 'Impression' - It is becoming more and more popular for people to buy traffic for their website. There are numerous websites which claim to drive 'targeted' traffic to your website through the use of pop-ups and pop-unders. In 2004, Gelver Schnitz from Munich, Germany banked over $14.5 million by driving 'fake' visitors to peoples websites and using an IP generator to show reporting. Gelver was discovered by an 18 year old who was using the service and after recieving the IP addresses decided to track them - the results were damming, 99.6% of the IP's were tracked back to Gelver himself. Fail.

3) The Clients That Don't Exist and the Mysterious Missing Andy - Andrew Macclesfield saw the success of many SEO agencies being from an affiliate marketing background, but never understood the concept. Andrew picked up a book and learnt the basics, set up a LTD company and hey presto, an SEO company was born. Initially, Andrew did try the 'straight and narrow' approach, cold calling clients and trying to build a consumer base. On one particular Wednesday afternoon, Andrew was talking to a firm in the Midlands, UK, they specialised in consumer electronics. Andrew hastily advised the prospect that he had optimised at least 50% of clients on the first page for major electrical goods such as washing machines and televisions - the prospect was sold and signed up for £2,500 per month over a 12 month contract - it was easy money. Andrew replicated this idea and soon built up an empire (on his own) bringing in recurring revenue of £198,000 per month - staggering. Andrew folded the company after one of the clients had found out that he actually didn't optimise one of their competitor sites and they had threatened litigation. Andrew, to this date, has never been found.

2) The Slippery Social Fish - This one's pretty recent and it truly astounded us. A woman in California had been reportedly claiming that she was an actual representative of Facebook and can dramatically help businesses get onto the social map to generate revenue. Thousands of businesses from 2008-2010 spent over $24,000,000 with Sarah Gilbert, she had even built up a sales force of 27 people all claiming to be from Facebook - she even told THEM they WERE partners of FACEBOOK. Sarah currently faces over 149 counts of fraud.

1) Mr Google (not to be confused with the SEO company) - This one's a real classic and is quite possibly the one that shocked us most - the Mr Google story. A man called Elster Fenchurch was an avid SEO and enjoyed everything about the darker side of SEO. Loved utilising black-hat techniques and manipulating search engines and was at the heart of pretty much every forum in the late 90's dedicated to ensuring Google served up anything other than the 'best possible results'. Elster cloned email addresses from Google and contacted an estimated 183,000,000 people claiming to be from Google and that, for a price, he could guarantee a ranking within their index. The way that the email was written looked incredibly convincing and Elster managed to harness over $94,000,000. Elster actually passed away before being convicted of any crime at all after dieing from a sudden heart attack at his home in Delaware, USA.

Posted: 22/11/10 10:07