Snake Oil Metrics
What Shady Affiliate Marketers Teach Us About SEO Ethics
If it sounds too slick, it probably is.
Anyone who's dipped a toe in the affiliate marketing world knows the routine:
🚨 Urgent!
🚀 Passive income!
💰 Five figures in five weeks!
🔒 Secret strategy only *we* know!
It’s a masterclass in manipulation, and unfortunately, the same tactics have bled into mainstream SEO agency work.
If you've ever felt uneasy about an SEO agency that sold you the dream but didn’t deliver the details — this post is for you.
Affiliate marketing’s biggest strength is its biggest red flag.
Affiliate marketers are phenomenal at:
- Framing themselves as experts (with little proof)
- Creating scarcity where there is none
- Overloading you with metrics that don’t matter
It’s the illusion of insight. And it works… until it doesn’t.
Many of my clients have seen this movie before.
They just didn’t realize they were watching it again with a different title when they hired their last SEO agency.
How shady affiliate tactics show up in SEO agencies
Here’s how those same behaviors show up in SEO:
Affiliate BS: “Secret hack to get traffic!”
SEO Agency Spin: “Our proprietary SEO formula.”
🧩 Translation: If they can’t explain it in plain English, they probably don’t understand it either.
Affiliate BS: “$5k/month in passive income!”
SEO Agency Spin: “We guarantee 1st page rankings in 90 days.”
🚩 Reality check: No one can promise rankings. Not even Google.
Affiliate BS: “Act now — this offer expires at midnight!”
SEO Agency Spin: “Lock in your spot before our calendar fills up.”
⏳ Manufactured urgency is a tactic, not a strategy.
Affiliate BS: “Use these tools to automate your income!”
SEO Agency Spin: “We’ll automate everything with AI content + backlinks.”
🤖 Bulk output isn’t optimization — it’s digital trash.
You’re not hiring a strategist. You’re signing up for a funnel.
Red flags that should make you walk away
- Vague deliverables (“We’ll publish blog content and get you backlinks.”)
- Locked-in contracts that don’t allow for change or cancellation
- No explanation of why (“We do five backlinks and three blogs a month” — cool. Why?)
- Overuse of dashboards as a distraction from real outcomes
Good SEO doesn’t look like a sales letter. It looks like research, testing, refinement, and slow, steady progress.
What ethical SEO actually looks like
It’s not sexy. But it works.
- A real plan tied to your site’s needs, not a template
- Deliverables with a purpose
- Reporting tied to behavior and visibility, not “activity”
- Strategy that evolves as we learn what works (and what doesn’t)
It’s boring. But honest SEO should be boring — especially if the last few people you worked with sounded like car salesmen with a page builder subscription.
What this means for you
Ask every SEO provider:
- “Why this strategy?”
- “How do we know if it’s working?”
- “What happens if it doesn’t?”
If they fumble those answers, it’s not strategy. It’s a script.
Final Thought
Not every SEO agency is shady. But way too many are trained to sell, not solve.
At Signal & Structure, there’s no secret sauce.
No magic formulas. No fluff.
Just honest strategy, built to earn trust — and rankings.
Because the only real SEO “shortcut” is knowing what you’re doing.
Tired of paying for performance theater, or need help cutting through the SEO noise? Let’s talk.