Guaranteed ranking is one of the biggest scams out there right now and anyone that offers it is not a real SEO.  Real SEO’s understand that you can’t guarantee results because the search engines algorithms are secret and change contantly.  There are also other factors beyond the SEO’s control, what happens if your hosting has an outage during a Google indexing and  your site is dropped?  What happens if you site is hacked and someone puts spam in the content and it is de-indexed?  What happens if someone that has access to your site decides to change the title tag and your site nose-dives in the rankings.  What happens if…..

There was recently a very intersting and upsetting fiasco on DigitalPoint forums with a couple of senior members that were offering a guaranteed SEO ranking service.  The long and short of it was that senior member A and senior member B joined forces to offer an amazing SEO service that was guaranteed results or your money would be 100% refunded.  Here is an exact quote,

I am giving a FULL MONEY BACK GUARANTEE because if anything goes wrong, I will be responsible and no one else and I will be more than happy to REFUND YOU FULLY NO HASSLES!

Compensation is 100% money back as promised. Once the position is achieved, the negotiation will take place in order for your keyword to maintain the position.

I will rank any keyword (Yes you read this right, ANY KEYWORD) or any key phrase in the first page of Google with the competition of under 2 Million in the period of 4-8 Months. Of course many people here on DP can probably do SEO jobs and they can do it great but can they offer a MONEY BACK GUARANTEE?

This was promised by a member that has over 13,500 post and an iTrader rating of 462 complete successful deals.

Soon these type of posts began popping up (there was supposed to be a monthly report):

still no report and it is now half a month late. how many more broken promises are we going to have to put up with?

Still waiting for my report for the service I ordered on the 20th of February

Still no report. You said it would be sent on the 29th and then on 31st and still don’t have it.

Our report has not arrived despite numerous promises from you. Are you going to send it or not?

Please may I have m reports which you have promised you will send me on several occasions.

STILL waiting on a report DESPITE two weeks of being told “i’ll send it today”, this was due on march 14th. Can you send the report today?

Still waiting for report from the 5th from SEO services. Any idea when it will arrive?

Sold my share in “First Page in Google Services” ~ now owned by KingofKings 100%

As of today, these services are 100% owned by KingofKings via private arrangement. This service is in regards to all sales for the following threads:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=532262
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370

KingofKings is now taking these services to the next level of which I am unable to spend time on, due to other business projects.

Then the stuff really hits the fan at full speed:

That’s the problem I have. I am unable to fix whatever problems exist. King has the money, not me. If there is refunding to happen, it will come from King. If I did have the money I would refund people.

If you want to read the whole sad tale then head over to this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370&highlight=100%25+refund 573 posts in that thread alone with over 22k views.  It is estimated that over $60k in SEO fees were stolen.