How do you deal with Scam-Type SEO businesses?

[roger205]

One of our potential clients is a limousine rental service. His current "Marketer" is going about his business in a seemingly sketchy way. I'm pretty new to having to compare myself to other SEO/Marketing competition.

So, this guy has 100's of websites that are nearly identical. Quite a few have duplicate content, but all of them generally look the same. He leases these websites as lead generators:

Think of it like this: he probably has 15-20 websites all geared for different parts of the DFW area. Denton Limo Service, Plano Limo Service, Dallas Limo Service, Etc. He also has a bunch of websites for other industries. Every "business" has its own phone number via a Google Number that he forwards to the actual business line. Every "business" has a Google My Business Listing setup as well with no address listed. When someone fills out the contact form on one of these sites, it is forwarded to the business who is leasing it.

He also creates his own backlinks on his websites to all of his other websites.

I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right? I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO.

Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this? If so, what do you do about it?

[EGOL]

I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right?

He might get whacked - especially if the sites have verbatim text on every page.  He might get away with it for a long long time if each site has totally unique text and he isn't interlinking these sites very heavily or interlinking them with nofollow.  Lots of people are able to link between their own properties if they are using the biz name as the anchor text instead of a money keyword.  (I know that this answer wasn't satisfying, but that's my opinion on how diverse are the ways that Google handles these things.

I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO.

Ignorant bliss has a large overlap with black hat in appearance, although the intent is very different.  It's blackhat if these sites are identical except for the name of the community and the seller of the service knows that this is far below best practice.... and even worse if they are being juiced from a private blog network or paid links from ignorant webmasters or from those who know paid links are not good but sell anyway.

Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this?

This stuff is everywhere. Sometimes they grab your content and use it in New Jersey.

If so, what do you do about it?

Beat their asses with quality.