💥 The Great IT Gouge: How the Tech Industry Became a Playground for Legalised Theft, This is unrelated but I had to put this up. It is related to experience looking after Abilityclassifieds.com.au

This was going to be a reply to an IT so called SEO proffesional.. 

$10K–$15K for a website? You're kidding, right? What are they building, NASA’s launch control or a shrine to their own incompetence?

I host my own sites hosted on Digital Ocean. Big sites. Heavy traffic. And guess what? It costs me peanuts compared to what you are saying. If I’d listened to the GoDaddy gospel or the “we swear we’re local” Australian ISP mafia, I’d be broke and buried under invoices for things that should be free, or at least not daylight robbery.

Let’s talk SSL certificates. Oh yes, the crown jewel of IT scams. It’s just an algorithm, folks. I’ve never paid for one. Never will. And yet, these tech vampires will slap up to a $300 price tag on it like it’s handcrafted by monks in the Himalayas. Biggest gouge in IT history. Period.

I’ve got my emails sorted with an Aussie ISP, domains registered, and a third-party email service that costs me $25 AUD a month. That’s it. No gold-plated servers. No “enterprise-grade” fluff. Just clean, functional tech.

🕵️‍♂️ SEO: The Snake Oil of the Digital Age

Now let’s talk about the SEO criminals. These are the modern-day con artists with keyboards.

They’ll promise you the moon, sprinkle some keywords like fairy dust, and vanish with your money faster than you can say “Google algorithm.”

They never mention:

• What code your site is built on (Symfony, WordPress, Drupal, who cares, right?)
• That image compression and lazy loading actually help visibility
• That converting images to .webp is like giving Google a foot massage
• That filenames like image1.jpg are SEO suicide

Instead, it’s:

“Gimme a heap of money and in 3–4 months you might see results.”

Oh, and meta descriptions? Meta titles? Never heard of them. These geniuses think backlinks grow on trees.

Are they going to sit around writing guest blogs with your, web address sneaked in, for your niche? Doubt it.

Most of those sites where you need to put backlinks are your competitors anyway. Not to mention you must ask them. Would you be that thick skinned to ask? You know can you put this link to my website so I can redirect your potential customers from your website.

And don’t get me started on the failed car salesmen turned SEO gurus. What do they know about your industry?

Nothing. But they’ll still ask for money upfront, then more money later, and then, surprise! even more money.

🧨 Wake Up, Business Owners

The IT industry has become a free-for-all for gouging, a digital Wild West where everyone’s got a badge and no one’s got a clue.

They prey on small business owners, promising visibility while delivering invoices.

Here’s what they won’t tell you:

• Use descriptive, keyword-rich filenames like accessible-housing-guide.jpg
• Use hyphens, not camelCase or underscores
• Include your site name when relevant
• Avoid garbage like IMG_1234.jpg
• Enable lazy loading
• Compress images retroactively
• Generate an image sitemap

These are basic, effective, and free strategies. But they don’t sell well, so the SEO parasites keep them buried under jargon and invoices.

That if they know about them.

🚨 Final Thought

99% of SEO “experts” should be arrested for fraud.

The other 1% are probably still deciding whether to charge you for breathing near their server rack.

If you’re a business owner, wake up. Learn the basics. Host your own site. Use open-source tools.

And for the love of all things digital, stop paying for SSL certificates.

Find fair dinkum honest Business owners, educate yourself in the services you are paying for.