Right now, I had planned on being aboard a winged coach on my way to Berlin for the TRG-Christmas-Party but sadly, the Lufthansa managed to break their toy and has to wait for some replacement parts now. This gives me some time to write something on the subject of transparency and quality of SEO-services. This discussion was started a few days ago by Mediadonis and others, like SEO-United (who, by the way, got a new website-design just yesterday) and Loewenherz have added their take on the matter. In a nutshell, this is about the linkbuilding-efforts of the legions of new SEO-agencies.

Marcus is correct in writing that many of the marketing-oriented SEO-firms will produce extremely low quality linkbuilding. Personally, I would go as far as to say that less than 10% of those companies on the market can be recommended for this service and even then, they will need an expert to go over the work to catch and correct qualitative-anomalies. But can transparency really combat this problem? Sure, there are a number of customers that learned how powerful a tool SEO can be and who are willing to invest accordingly. In those cases though, they usually employ inhouse SEO-knowledge, so that they can check and steer the work of contractors in this field – for this kind of customer it is useful to get a list of all the acquired links.

Personally though, I would say that the majority of SEO-contracts are below the 2.000 Euro a month mark, including the linkbuilding. If we assume, that half of that is for linkbuilding – then the agency will have 2, maybe 3 days a month for linkbuilding. To be honest: is there anything sensible that can be done in that time? The customer of such a monthly plan is used to seeing timely results from other marketing-channels and so wishes to see results from SEO, too – which are also often promised during the customer acquisition phase. In this case, entries in article-directories, blogcomments and all of the other well known crap are an obvious solution.

In no way do I want to approve of this, but I do want to mention that transparency alone will not solve this problem. A while ago, I wrote about this problem here and came to the conclusion that this linkbuilding-problem is quite complex and that only a customer that knows what is going on will be able to make the right decisions in the long run.