They take advantage of people who don't know much about computers. ex: they will tell you they will get you the keyword 'dentist' on google, then proceed to get you listed for 'new jersey dentist voorhees 08043' instead. They charge thousands of dollars for this service. http://www.maxexchange.com/ They came into my office last fall and told me they could get me on the front page of google for any keyword I wanted. I played dumb, as I usually do with SEO experts I come across, and had the guy tell me all sorts of promises. Now I find out they are charging my friend $1,100 to build a '4 page site' and then an additionaly several hundred dollar charge to get him 'on the front page of google' I found out about this after he had signed the contract and paid 1/2 up front. I promptly reported the site to google for having hidden keywords. The entire site is still a mess, black hat bullshit all over it, made in Frontpage 4.0 Google banned them, but only for the month of December it seemed. You can see the effect on their traffic on this chart: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.maxexchange.com/ Luckily I know enough to know their scam, but they are ripping many businesses in my area off, as well as a friend of mine. Besides resubmitting the site to google for bannage, Your advice? At the bottom of this page you can see more hidden text (this is one of their network sites) http://www.maxcontractors.com/ and here as well, http://www.maxexchange.com/connecticut/ One more example, http://www.maxexchange.com/day_care_centers/delaware.htm
NP These guys gives legit SEO companies a horrible name, and they are stealing our clients + lying to them. I went through and reported some of their spam-pages to google. If anyone else could go through and put in some reports, it would help.