BMW said it did not intend to deceive Google

In a recent notorious case, an insider revealed the marketing techniques of US company Traffic Power - an all-stops "always be closing" sales pitch designed to get whoever answered the phone to sign up for thousands of dollars of business. "Is it a priority for you to have higher placement on the search engines?" the salesperson was instructed to breathlessly ask. "Don't you want to maintain top of mind awareness?" And then they moved in for the kill: ". . . is money the only thing standing in the way of us doing business today?" But Mr Peczek says "black hat" operations are rare in Australia compared with Europe or the US. Google's guidelines as to what oversteps the boundaries are fairly clear, he says - though he disputes its advice not to trust a company that asks for an exchange of links. There is an ongoing debate about what crosses the line into "black hat". Experts this month deliberated over a consumer products site in the US that had received the optimisation touch. Phrases such as "fights bad breath" were made into "masked" links that looked like plain text to the naked eye. Opinion was divided as to whether this crossed the line. Even the biggest companies can fall foul of "black hat" work. In February, Google temporarily removed results for the German language websites of car maker BMW when it used so-called "doorway pages" - text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words that attract the attention of Google's indexing system. BMW said it did not intend to deceive Google. Mr Petryshen says the BMW case was positive for the industry. "Things like this show that if you do cheat Rosetta Stone Language you're going to get caught," he says. "It can seem (to clients) there are a lot of cowboys out there operating by the seat of their pants but those companies are starting to fall by the wayside. "The best way to tell them apart is to talk to their customers. If they don't want you to, it's a good sign that something is fishy." Tim MacDonald - whose company Found Agency worked with Fast Impressions on optimising its site - warns that not all optimisation experts are truly experts. "Many website designdevelopment firms claim to do SEO but actually know very little about it," he says. "You wouldn't trust everything a car salesperson tells you, and you should use that same level of scrutiny with people building your website. "Your best bet is to look at their client list. If an SEO has a good, recognisable client base, and their clients actually rank, you can be fairly sure that SEO is kosher." Optimisation professionals claim the per-click cost of a natural listing is as low as 10-25 per cent of the cost of paid advertisements. After going through the process, Fast Impressions found itself consistently at or near No. 1 on Google searches for several keywords. Mr Parfitt doesn't deny the results - and paid about $3000 for his initial optimisation work. But he is still ambivalent about the value of third-party optimisation. "It's something you can do yourself more effectively," he says. "For the past year and a half we've basically done our own site optimisation. To be honest, you just need to have a relevant site. Have a good service, build a good site with lots of relevant pages, make sure the content is nice and rich - and somewhat repetitive when it comes to certain keywords - and that's kind of all you really need to do.

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