One company offers first place ranking in Google for £650. Their small print says that if this doesn’t happen they’ll refund you but keep an admin fee of £75. What’s more, their “first place” seems to be in sponsored ads not organic results. You can buy those yourself.

The second was a phone call saying that they had a spare place on the first page of Google for “insert relevant keywords here”. I thought wow, who is this guy? Does he actually run Google? Because I hear that they don’t exactly need the money.

For any of you who are in the dark, let me make this absolutely clear: no one can guarantee you any place in the search rankings for any keywords.

Check out Google’s own guidelines on this. (Scroll down to No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.)