John Andrews, in his weblog, wrote an interesting entry titled A "Market for Lemons", a Nobel Prize, and Snake Oil SEO. The entry tackles about the ills of search engine optimization services.

Andrews wrote:

There is so much so-called SEO out there, mostly outdated, baseless, or downright wrong, that the accessible information is more wrong than right. A Google or Yahoo! search on SEO topics is ridiculous, for many reasons. Often accurate SEO information is considered trade secret by knowledge consultants, and thus is not very accessible. What appears in front of the inquisitive SEO consumer is mostly junk. This puts the prospective SEO client at a distinct disadvantage, and provides an opportunity for the contract-seeking "snake oil SEO salesman" to close a deal at a good profit, often without realistic accountability or other consumer safeguards in place. But, as the 2001 Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof showed in his famous paper "A Market for Lemons", asymmetrical information does much more than that. It actual can destroy the market for true, quality SEO.

As "boiler-room" SEO firms cold-call companies and pitch ridiculously low prices for SEO contracts, based on old and incorrect SEO information readily accessible to consumers, high quality SEO firms start looking "too expensive". Consumer research into SEO does not reveal better information, since that knowledge comprises a significant portion of the value SEO consulting, and is thus not freely published. The entire market for SEO services starts to become a market not for actual search engine optimization, but more a market for "snake oil SEO" than true SEO.

Other ills in the SEO industry include spam emails, black SEO techniques, and scam services. Indeed, SEO could turn out to be very vicious. Too bad these optimizers' techniques significantly harm those who are doing SEO in the legal and fair manner.