SEO companies have a dirty little secret, and it really gets on my nerves.  Most people usually sign it without giving it a second though, but the non-disclosure agreement is the secret weapon of the SEO world.  Why are they required and what purpose do they serve?  Well, I hope to shed a bit of light on what purpose I think they serve in the world of SEO, probably not the purpose most SEO companies would want you to believe.

Since the whole business of SEO is generally frowned upon by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and the like, since they try to work around search company’s algorithms in order to achieve high page ranks, SEO companies don’t want it advertised on which pages they are working or what their practices are.  This is fair enough it would seem, so signing a non-disclosure agreement seems to be a fairly innocuous thing to do. However, if we shift our perspective slightly, we can see what the agreement is really protecting SEO companies from. Irate customers.

If you sign a non-disclosure agreement with an SEO company and they either don’t do their job, or do their job so badly that you get banned or penalized in some way, who are you going to complain to?  If you disclose the fact that the company did the work for you, that is breach of contract and you can be sued.  So, as I always say, do your homework, find a good company to do the work for you, and be prepared to bite your tongue if they screw up your site, because you are not going to have anyone to complain to. That, my friends, is SEO’s dirty little secret.