It is interesting that Amazon.com has launched a new program called the Mechanical Turk where people in the world can earn small amounts of money doing tasks that are not suited to computers/artificial intelligence. Amazon bills it as "artificial artifical intelligence."

So, if you wanted to have a whole bunch of images organized and tagged, you could pay Amazon for the use of this system and they, in turn, would pay the people that are actually doing the work. Human robots in other words. Or if you wanted your blog posts submitted to Digg or Slashdot. Or various other Turk tasks (as imagined by Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb).

The Turk is an interesting idea, but isn't totally new. The business model is kind of unique, but spammers have been using a "Mechanical Turk" of sorts for quite a while. It is the way they get past "captchas."

A captcha is a graphic with some letters and numbers in it, and is basically a tool that tests whether you are a human being or not. You type the letters and numbers as you see them into a box in order to gain access to a certain web page or function of the website, such as posting a comment on somebody's blog. Here is a captcha taken from the comment-posting form on Matt Cutts' blog:

Captchas are only a moderately effective way of stopping blog spammers, because spammers have figured out a way to get humans to help them out for free. The spammers create porn sites and require the visitor to fill in a captcha form in order to access the site. But the captcha the visitor has to solve isn't some random captcha. It is a captcha taken from a site that they are trying to spam. Then, all the spammer does is take what has been typed in and submits it to the blog to post their spam.

So it's really the spam and porn people that are the innovators in this space of artificial, artificial intelligence. Ironic isn't it!

You can't just ask a Search Engine Optimization vendor if they are ethical. Of course they will say "yes." So if you are shopping for some SEO help, how do you screen out the baddies?

A while back I blogged about how to be objective with your SEO vendor selection, but I didn't specifically cover how to screen out the unethical ones. I will do that now.

First off, interview the vendor extensively. Get them to explain the techniques they will be using. A "yes" from them to any of the following questions is a warning sign:

• Do your techniques involve any kind of deception?
• Do you use proprietary techniques?
• Do you use doorway pages or anything similar?
• Do you do deceptive redirects?
• Have you ever had sites banned?
• Do you offer rank guarantees? (You can’t guarantee something you have no control over. The only way you can get a guaranteed rank is through pay-per-click.)
• Do you send email to prospects with whom they do not have a prior existing business relationship or permission from those prospects in advance? (If so, that's spam! Never do business with a spammer.)

During your discussions with the vendor, if they describe their SEO tactics as short-term, you might want to reconsider. SEO, when done right (i.e. when following "best practices"), has long-term sustainable impact — for years, in fact. For proof, just read this.

After you're done quizzing the vendor, talk to their clients. Ask those clients:

• Does your SEO vendor teach you how to fish, or do they always do the fishing for you?
• Have your traffic and sales gone up a lot because of the vendor? If so, do you believe the increase to be sustainable?
• How long have you worked with the vendor? How long do you plan to continue working with them? Any idea what the vendor's client churn rate is?

Then you'll need to do some of your own investigating. Check the HTML code on their clients' sites for hidden text, hidden links, and so forth. Also examine what their clients' websites are serving to the search engines. There are a couple different ways to view a website through the eyes of a search engine spider: one is through a Firefox browser extension called User Agent Switcher; the other is through the cached version of the page that was indexed by the engine, available from the Cached link in the search results. Compare and contrast the page meant for the search engines to that corresponding page off the native website as seen by a normal visitor. If the content served up to the search engines is something completely different than what is served up to visitors, then they are spamming. Things to look for when making your comparison: if the title tag is significantly different, and if keywords have been stuffed into the body copy, the meta tags, and into parts of the website to help the version that was shown to search engines rank better. Finally, search the online forums and SEO directories like SEOPros.com and SEOConsultants.com with Google for complaints about the vendor.

Got any horror stories or lessons learned to share from dealing with a less-than-stellar SEO vendor? Post a comment.