I've often advised clients to avoid shady SEO (search engine optimization) firms. Then they ask the inevitable, impossible-to-answer next question, "How can I tell if an SEO firm is shady?" To which I usually reply, "All of them."
I kid! I jest! I mock because I love! I know it's just most of them.
But the second question is even more subtle: "What do they do that makes them shady, and why is that bad for me?"
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A while back I wrote a well-received article called How to stroke text in Illustrator in which I went to some lengths to exclude most general audiences through dense over-the-top jargon and industry-specific inside jokes.
Hell, I even threw in some unrelated porn references ('stroke like an amateur!') and SEO jokes ('that will increase Google traffic!') to increase Google traffic. It worked. It returns my article on the first page of results (if you match the right pieces of my personal Google profile, anyway) for 'stroke' and in the top hits for 'Illustrator stroke'. It gets a lot of hits and comments.
Google, like people, tries to be as helpful as it can. You give it a word like 'stroke' and it doesn't really care whether you're talking about the clotting kind, the caressing kind or the arcane designer kind of stroke: it just returns the highest-ranked results. If you scroll down to the bottom of Google you can disambiguate that search a little. But unlike a person, Google doesn't really care what you mean semantically, it just does what its algorithm tells it.
If you have a word like 'stroke' and it's linked to a webpage then that webpage gets a little more Google street cred. The best thing you can do after optimizing your website for SEO is to convince people to link to it using your preferred keywords. The reputable SEO firms will talk to bloggers, web directories, news outlets, and even individual web sites about link exchanges or reviews with links back to the site. The shady ones will try to just scam links.
So I got a really interesting comment on that article today: "Wow. This is great stroke information. I am a true stroke amateur." I mean, it's not an interesting comment at all, just trying to be funny about the article and failing. But then I looked at the link information for the submitter's name: a website (that will remain nameless) dealing with the medical kind of strokes.
This is shady SEO at its finest. On the face of it, who does it hurt? Probably not the nameless website. If I allowed the link, I'm sure their traffic would increase quite a bit, since my article's page is highly ranked for that keyword. Google couldn't really penalize them for it. All they did was search for the top hits for their keyword and try to scam a link in the comments of that page.
Honestly, I have to admire their dedication. But just because Google can't penalize them doesn't make it right, or useful to the web at large to muddy semantic waters and place irrelevant links. And you should ask yourself: will you hire a shady SEO firm who believes that the ends justifies the means? Might they break other rules as well, possibly ones that Google could penalize you for?
I wouldn't want to take that chance. If they don't care about my website I don't think they'll care much about yours once their check clears.
