I hired this guy to do onpage optimization seo work for my site. I sent him $40 USD through Paypal, and he sends me a few tips which I can find for free on the internet (adding some alt tags for pictures) and a few meta tags (this guy is a total scam). I put in the meta tags he sent me, and my site went from #3 to #6 for the keyword "buy neopoints". Did the meta tags hurt my rankings? My site is: http://buynps.org The tags he sent were like: <meta content="follow, all" name="robots"> <meta content="follow, all" name="googlebot"> <meta content="follow, all" name="msnbot"> <meta content="buy neopoints, neopets, neopets cheats, neopets help, free neopoints, neopets dailies, neopoints, buy cheap neopoints" name="keywords"> <meta content="Aeiwi, Alexa, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL Netfind, Anzwers, Canada, DirectHit, EuroSeek, Excite, Overture, Go, Google, HotBot. InfoMak, Kanoodle, Lycos, MasterSite, National Directory, Northern Light, SearchIt, SimpleSearch, WebsMostLinked, WebTop, What-U-Seek, AOL, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Excite, Magellan, LookSmart, CNET, Googlebot" name="search_engines"> <meta content="global" name="distribution"> He says it's "his" method of SEO, but I think Google might think the site is spam? Please help, and where can I report a scammer?
Personally I would say they did not help. 1. <meta content="follow, all" name="robots"> These are useless. The job of the bot is to index and follow we do not have to tell them to do this. 2. <meta content="buy neopoints, neopets, neopets cheats, neopets help, free neopoints, neopets dailies, neopoints, buy cheap neopoints" name="keywords"> Keyword stuffed 3. <meta content="Aeiwi, Alexa, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL Netfind, Anzwers, Canada, DirectHit, EuroSeek, Excite, Overture, Go, Google, HotBot. InfoMak, Kanoodle, Lycos, MasterSite, National Directory, Northern Light, SearchIt, SimpleSearch, WebsMostLinked, WebTop, What-U-Seek, AOL, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Excite, Magellan, LookSmart, CNET, Googlebot" name="search_engines"> You can have a name= anything you want. These do not do any good. 4. <meta content="global" name="distribution"> pointless as well. The only meta that does any good are the ones that help visitors. Titles. Tell the visitors the page title and also help with page relevancy Description. Same reason. Keywords. Hardly worth it but some search engines still use them and you never know when others will start. These are up to you. Some people use them some don't. Personally I would forget the word SEO as it put you in the wrong frame of mind. You would be better off thinking of it as VO. "Visitor Optimization". If you start doing things just for search engines you're heading down the wrong road. VO are Things like: Accessibility, Your titles on text links and alt tags on images to make your page accessible by all no matter what limitations they may have. Readability. Font size and color scheme, layout. Usability. How easy is it to understand. Navigability. How easy is it to navigate and know where you are on the site. VO friendly URL. Easy to remember URL. Trust. Does your site bestow this to the visitor. Anything you do to help the visitor will only help. Anything you do just for search engines may hurt when it comes to on page SEO. To answer your question. Depending on how he advertised you can report him to PayPal. But this may not do any good as he did send you the info you requested. You can also look at the IFCC "internet fraud complaint center" if he is in the USA. at http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx Hope this helps