Top 10 Internet Marketing Scams

Internet business scams have only continued to spread like wildfire, especially in our floundering economy.  From the unemployed to the undereducated, these scams have taken full advantage of countless people.  For those of you considering starting your own business online, many of these scams might sound like a perfect fit.  With the still-shaky job market and even with the broad appeal of working from home, there are still way too many consumers getting scammed.

As a general rule of thumb, any offer that looks too good to be true is just that "too good to be true".  It’s getting harder and harder, however, to distinguish the legitimate money making opportunities from the dubious ones.  Internet business and home-based business scams are also very easy to pull off because people want to believe they can truly make money fast while working for themselves.

Take a look at the following what we consider the worst home-based business and work-at-home scams that you need to be more vigilant.


1. We’ll Submit Your Website to Hundreds of Search Engines!

Bad idea. This is one of the worst internet marketing scams. First of all, there are 4 primary search engines that handle about 95% of all internet searches, so submitting to anything other than the 4 primary is pretty much useless. Second of all, search engines don’t like submissions. There is a lot of documentation to prove this. Search engines simply like to find websites on their own through incoming links to the site. In fact, they have gotten so good at it, that it doesn’t take weeks or months for a site to get indexed anymore. If there are incoming authority links to the site, it can be indexed in a matter of days.

The last issue has to do with the fact that many of these services mention as a selling point that they will re-submit your site weekly or monthly to the search engines. This is definitely a no no, and is actually completely pointless. If the search engine already knows you exist, there is no point to telling them over and over.

2. Get #1 Ranking in Google In Short Time!

Of course this isn’t a bad thing… but wait, read the fine print. Do you get to choose your own keyword? I doubt it. No competent SEO consultant is going to guarantee a #1 ranking for a set price for any keyword you choose.

All keywords are not created equal. The likely scam of companies that advertise top ranking on search engines is ranking you for uncompetitive keywords. These are keywords that might look good, but in reality don’t get traffic, and are very easy to rank well in based on a lack of competition. Beware of unreasonable guarantees… If it sounds too good to be true, IT IS.

3. Get 2,000 Backlinks for only $49.95! Guaranteed!

This is a scary offer! Too many unknowns. The sad thing is that this will probably hurt your search engine ranking, and not help it. The only way someone could offer this many backlinks is through spammy link sites and/or crappy directories. Or, they may happen to own a few large sites that can offer the links. Either way, I guarantee you that #1. the links won’t be relevant #2. the pages will be of extremely low quality #3. your ranking will not improve.

4. We Will Submit Your Website to Over 1,000 Directories!

Wow! Really?! That’s amazing! How do you do that? The answer is simple… There really are thousands of free directories out there, but the question is, do you want your site to be included on all of them? The answer is a very resounding: NO. Yes, of course there are plenty of free and paid directories out there that are worth getting listed on like DMOZ and BOTW, and there are even services that you can pay to manually submit your website to legitimate directories like: Best Web Directories Submission Service. But, you have to be very careful. Many of these scams will submit your site to automated link farms that can really hurt your ranking. Make sure you have a full list of directories in your hand before submission.

5. Link Exchange Programs (reciprocal linking)

You may easily found many of webmasters really eager to exchange links with each other especially when the other page's PageRank is higher then them. Just type "link exchange" in Google you will found thousands of them. But you must be very careful in choosing web site to exchange link. Some of them just make your PageRank going down into the drain by wasting your PageRank.

The webmaster restrict any search engine's robot from crawling into the directory, in this case 'linkbuilder' directory. If you have exchange link with this web site, the spider will not see your link on the page, so it contribute nothing to you PageRank. Obviously, your web page has a link to this web site (because you exchange link with him) and the spider see it. Your web page give a point to the web site, but the website give nothing to yours. As a result the PR of the web site will increase, but your web site's PageRank will go down.

Another way of link exchange's scam is to make your link hidden from search engines' spiders. The link can be hidden by putting it inside javascript, redirect it to a php or asp process page, instead of plain 'a href' HTML code. They may also use CSS to trick your eye, which make link appear to be correct, but in fact it is redirected to another way around before it go to your web site. Why would you pay for something that doesn’t work?

6. Banner Exchange Programs

These are all but dead, but they are worth noting because there are many sites owner that still waste their time with these. Bottom line: they pull visitors away from your site, you never know what types of sites will be linking to you (this could be potentially dangerous), the conversion rates are horrible, most banner exchange sites have been proven to cheat customers out of links, who wants to look at a website filled of banner ads?

7. Send An Email Ad to 10,000 Opt-In Subscribers

Can you say illegal? Most of the scams already mentioned probably won’t get you or the company advertising them prison time. Since the Can-Spam Act most people have wised up to this scam. It’s obvious that spamming people is a dangerous endeavor. Although it is still a huge industry, and there are many that simply beat the system, most would agree that it isn’t in line with “best business” practices. The above offer has problems written all over it. Are the emails really opt-in? What if they aren’t, are you willing to take full liability?

Not only is it a bad idea from a legal perspective, but from a business perspective as well. Why would you even consider sending an email to a group of people that you don’t know anything about? What are their interests? What are their email habits? What is the open and click rate?

If you are really interested in starting an email campaign, start one yourself. That way, you will know for sure that they are opt-in, and you will be able to manage the results.

8. We Guarantee Top Search Engine Results Through Professional Meta Tag Optimization!

Admittedly, this is an older sales technique that isn’t used as much anymore, but it is still pretty common. This sales tactic plays on people’s ignorance about search engine optimization. Some poor schmo may have heard the term “meta tag” in some old poorly written marketing article, and thinks that it is the key to success. Sometimes the cost is outrageous. It’s just ridiculous how much someone would charge for 20 minutes of work, and sad that many people have been duped by this scam.

9. Boosting a Website’s Rankings Through Black Hat Techniques

This is a touchy issue. But the bottom line is that “Black Hat SEO” uses techniques that try to trick search engines into better ranking. There are hundreds of techniques involved, but some of the more well known are doorway, gateway and mirror pages, redirects, cloaking, invisible pages… the list goes on and on. Don't ever try any of the above, or any other “secret” way to trick a search engine into better ranking. And believe it or not, there are actually SEO firms that will perform services like this for you. Be careful, you could easily get banned. Find out for sure if your SEO company is dedicated to White Hat techniques.

10. Nigerian 419 scams

A ‘Nigerian’ scam is a form of upfront payment or money transfer scam. They are called Nigerian scams because the first wave of them came from Nigeria, but they can come from anywhere in the world. The ‘4-1-9’ part of the name comes from the section of Nigeria’s Criminal Code which outlaws the practice.

The scammers usually contact you by email or letter and offer you a share in a large sum of money that they want to transfer out of their country. They may tell you about money trapped in central banks during civil wars or coups, often in countries currently in the news. Or they may tell you about massive inheritances that are difficult to access because of government restrictions or taxes in the scammer’s country.

Scammers ask you to pay money or give them your bank account details to help them transfer the money. You are then asked to pay fees, charges or taxes to help release or transfer the money out of the country through your bank. These ‘fees’ may even start out as quite small amounts. If paid, the scammer make up new fees that require payment before you can receive your ‘reward’. They will keep making up these excuses until they think they have got all the money they can out of you. You will never be sent the money that was promised.