Editor's note: The following article was originally written in 2012. Adelaide Websites only abide by clean, ethical SEO as recommended by Google, Bing and other search engines.

When considering a marketing agency to assist with your online marketing objectives and advertising strategies, be aware of those that use dubious in-house methods that change your hosting/DNS arrangement for supposed SEO gain or improved reporting of user behaviours.

Some SEO companies have hosting technologies that can improve the ranking of your website content in the short term, but ultimately fail in the long term for increasing the ranking of your own domain, and can in fact stop online payments from working. 'Reverse proxy technology' is one such method used by at least one global SEO company operating in Australia. If put in place and in operation for some weeks, once stopped and cancelled this more often than not results in your website ranking worse than before the method was put in place.

We have seen time and time again failures of this technology. We have now had at least three of our clients try this reverse proxy method with a global SEO company operating in Australia, and on each occasion they were left worse off either during their short term SEO efforts (payment methods failing), as well as completely falling off the first page after cancelling their contract for reverse proxy technology, even if they were on the first page beforehand.

So, what is 'Reverse Proxy Technology'? Find out The Pitfalls of Reverse Proxy Technology