Keep your shields up when anyone sells you search rankings. Google doesn’t publish the rules; everyone in this industry — us included — works from educated guesses, testing, and continuing homework. So when a caller guarantees the top of Google by next month for a comfortable monthly fee, you’re not talking to someone with a secret. You’re talking to the used-car salesmen of the internet.
The classic version of the trick is backlinks. In the early days of Google you really could brute-force a ranking by scattering thousands of links to your website around the internet, and an industry grew up doing exactly that. Google caught on years ago; sites that try it now tend to collect a slap on the wrist instead of a ranking. The modern versions are subtler — spammy blog posts stuffed with juicy keywords, “authority packages,” AI-generated article farms — but the shape is the same: activity you can invoice for, results you can’t check.
We’d rather tell you what actually moves the needle, because most of it is already included in the way we build.
