SEO Hack vs. SEO Police

A long-time client of mine hired a new CEO. This CEO wants me to meet with the two SEOs that he worked with in his former company.

He says one of the SEOs is an "SEO Hack" and uses unethical methods to keep sites in the top 3 positions. He says the other SEO is an "SEO Policeman" who steps in when the sites lose positions due to the unethical SEO that the "SEO Hack" does, and the "SEO Policeman" is able to get the sites back into the top positions. The CEO says this balancing act works very well for his former company's sites. He wants me to meet with these two SEOs and work with them to keep my client's site highly competitive (which it already is).

What exactly is this balancing act that this CEO talking about? I mean I know what unethical SEO is and not only do I not do it, I get black hat SEO out of sites that I optimize. What exactly does this "SEO Policeman" do - just get the black hat SEO out of a site when it loses positions? How can this hack/police balancing act work better than straighforward white hat SEO?

How can I convince the CEO and the SEOs that black hat SEO will eventually hurt my client's site, without losing my client in the process?

Thanks in advance for all comments.

These two could be taking the guy for a ride.

I suspect it's more likely that the hack is a nameless guy who tries dodgy stuff until he gets caught. The policeman is a known SEO who the search engines trust - because he doesn't do unethical SEO. He'll write to the search engine and say something like, "Client X has hired me to optimise their site. It seems they've been the victim of an unethical agency. I've taken all the spam off their site now and cleaned up their act. Please include them in your index again". Since the search engines trust the second guy - that's what they do.

It might not even go that far. The unethical hack could just begin by setting up doorway pages. They'll run and be successful until Google notices them. Then the "policeman" comes along, takes the doorways down, charges for in-page SEO and does that. That will then push the site back up the rankings.

Reasons to avoid this idea - when the search engines wise up (especially in the former example) they'll get annoyed. It places an awful lot of faith in this SEO doubleteam. There's negative publicity to be had from being caught spamming these days. Your competitiors are more SEO savvy than ever before. You can't maintain a balancing act if your rival is ready to spam report you the very day you edge to the unethical side.

Sorry to say this... but if the new CEO insists on this arrangement you may need to bow out of this relationship to save your own process and keep the integrity of your client base intact...this double-team type approach will eventually fail because at some point the engines will find out about the hidden black hat/white hat relationship and then the credibility of the "white hat" seo'er will be permanently tainted...

I would bow out. If he thinkgs the process works so well then you're not going to last long anyway because he'll find a reason to get rid of you and hire his two buddies.

Convince the boss that the hack and policeman are uneccesary expenses. Do it right the first time and the company will not need to pay them. Take what they would have paid them and get some good links.

All the above advice looks good to me.