When it’s your task to promote and protect your brand reputation, then you should beware of slick SEO middlemen that interfere in social media and customer relationships.

The risks of engaging in “black hat” and “gray hat” SEO tactics are well-known by most brand managers. These are attempts to attract search traffic in a deceitful manner that violates search engines’ terms of service. Such tactics include keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, link farming and blog comment spam, among other. They can get you banned by the search engines, making you invisible to many of your potential online customers.

A new threat is now emerging: SEO middlemen that participate in social media and blogger relations for the sole purpose of boosting search-engine traffic. Many of these efforts are backfiring.

Here’s the pitch:

“I noticed one of your posts has a link to our client. In an effort to assist with our online marketing efforts, would it be possible to modify this link to a new URL that will aid our SEO optimization efforts? Please let me know if this is possible. It would be a great help to us. Thank you for considering this request and please continue to provide marketing insight on your blog.”

As you can see, this is completely tied to a self-serving SEO agenda and nothing else. This sort of of commercial engagement is nothing more than spam.

Be wary of smooth SEO middlemen that meddle in social media and customer relationships. Middlemen are not an excuse for bad deeds. Nor are they a buffer from the consequences.