If you’re just trying to rank your site and you run into offers to help you do exactly that for a measly fee of $299 (or a lot more) it can be difficult to know what to do. After all, not all of us are fully up to date on what’s working right now in the search engines, and it can be quite easy to take these people up on their offers.

The fact here is that what worked yesterday may not work now, and you really have no way of easily knowing that. All of these companies have vested interests, and providing you services is how they keep the doors open. You need to simply make sure you’re not doing something that can hurt you, and possibly help.

So instead of raise the white flag of surrender, let’s have a look at 5 SEO services we know no longer work, so you don’t spend any of your precious marketing budget on them.

5 SEO Services to No Longer Buy

1. Yelp, Yellow Pages and Yext – I’m wanting to say anything that begins with “Y”, but I can’t bring myself to include Yahoo. (Yet) Each of these companies purport to help raise your local rankings in the search engines, but you can do what they do for free, and avoid the negatives associated with each. Yelp for example has run into many problems. Any review sites can easily fall from grace so beware.
2. Any search engine submission service – Most search engines, Google especially, PREFER to find your pages on their own by crawling them. Making sure you create relevant and timely content, and share it socially does all they want to do for you and more.
3. Spun content to oodles of pages – Since we’re all aware that Content is King, many kings ought to be good, right? Not really. The practice of taking your articles or blog posts, spinning the holy mother out of it, and submitting it all over the place was the cause for the recent Penguin update.
4. Link farms – Creating linkwheels and link pyramids worked like a charm for a long time. To succeed with this now, you need to be smarter than Google. If you are, proceed with glee!
5. Buying backlinks – Purchasing backlinks, particularly run of site links, are easily discoverable by Google, who will slap your site silly. These days, getting legitimate backlinks is simpler than ever, so why risk it?