Help to identify that this SEO agency is doing a TERRIBLE job
-
Hi folks,
I am working with a group for which I do SEO etc. for one part of the group. Another part of the group hired an SEO agency to carry out their SEO for them (before I joined).
In short, they are doing a terrible job by building links in very dodgy directories (ones which get taken offline) and via machine generated 'articles' on horrendously bad 'blogs'.
Please take a look at these 'articles' and leave your thoughts below so I can back up the point that these guys are not the kind of SEOs we should be working with.
- [List of links to articles removed by moderator]
Many thanks in advance,
Gill.
-
Hi folks!
The original question in this discussion basically asks the community to condemn an SEO company. A request of this nature is a violation of both our Community Guidelines and TAGFEE Code. As such, we have removed all links that could lead to the identification of the SEO company in question; and we are closing this discussion to additional responses.
We apologize for not taking action on this sooner.
Thanks so much for your understanding!
Christy
-
For sure! At least with social it's almost instantly evident when they don't know what they're doing, for SEO too much wool can be pulled over the eyes of the none technical
-
IMO, that is the worst part of being in SEO/Social Media. There are so many providers that do a less than lousy job for their clients: making things worse, rather than better.
And even fewer people who do a good job with local.
-
Thanks for the comments.
[Comment removed by moderator.]
As Igor says above, those 'articles' are terrible for these reasons:
- Spammy over optimised anchors
- Many identical anchor texts
- Zero value
On top of that the 'articles' are machine generated which I confirmed when I mystery shopped one of the 'blogs'. I assume they are hosted in bad neighbourhoods and there are not something I want to be associated with.
Need to weed out these kind of people and expose them as crooks.
Thanks again,
Gill.
-
Yes, they're not great. As you know, backlinks like this simply have zero value; you wouldn't even want them if they were free so, they're certainly not worth investing in (with either time or money). As it stands, none of those examples are particularly toxic, nor do they appear to number in the thousands, so they'll simply end up getting ignored by Google. Thankfully, you do have a decent spread of high-quality inbound links. [Link removed by moderator.] That said, they want to put a stop to the "spammy link-building, before the balance shifts.
They've got a great-looking website. If all of the" effort"* invested in building these links was invested in building just one piece of great, link-worthy content then they'd be considerably better-off.
They need to realise that when it comes to link-building, quantity is no substitute for quality. You're absolutely right to take a stand against this, let's hope they heed your advice.
*granted, they don't represent a great deal of effort
-
Agreed! Thanks very much for taking the time!
-
Yes, these don't look great, to say the least. [**Comment removed by moderator.] **Anchors are spammy and all of the "optimized" anchors are coming from websites with low domain quality scores.
This is not good:
[Link removed by moderator]I outlined two examples (there are more), see that 8 domains link to your website 55 times with an identical keyword anchor. That is as spammy as it gets and may results in being filtered.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Regarding SEO Structured Data
1. Should we add organization schema on all pages of the website OR just homepage? 2. What is the best practice for catalog page schema as every website is following a different pattern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati1 -
Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed
For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site. We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case. It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off. Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site. (FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ_AV0 -
Is dynamic pages helps in E commerce SEO?
Whats are the best way to create dynamic pages in eCommerce website having static urls? Or what are other ways to increase/create more pages in websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Are Their Any SEO Dangers When Cleaning Up a Site
I'm doing some housekeeping on my website. Removing old blogs that are out of date (2008) or things have moved on. The blogs I'm removing are being 301'd to relevant newer blogs. Can this type of clean up cause any problems that affect the optimisation of a site? Looking forward to hearing your views. Christina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Recommended SEO companies
I'm trying to find SEO companies to partner with. Are they any you can recommend that are near San Diego?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoniHicksAssociates0 -
Victim of negative SEO
Hello, I'm one of those people that got the "unnatural links" message from google. Since i run my site from the very first day and always was a one man business i know all the ins and outs of the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Henkiepenkie
Basicly i have never ever used a seo company to submit my site anywhere.
Never ever i used any shady tactic to get better ranks.
The only thing i did was trading traffic/links with real active websites, being daily updated, high traffic, etc etc. So. After i got notified in webmaster tools i started digging into a list (provided by webmaster tools) to find out why i got this message (meanwhile i lost 75% of my se traffic in past 3 months) After searching for hours i found out that in the past 2 / 3 months my site has been spammed on about 150 forums (completely dead forums with nothing but spam on it) There was no logic at all since my site got linked with the most ridiculous and unlogical word phrases.
My site is adult related and all spam links contained word phrases like "bangladesh mobile" or "rock girl" or "animal abuse" or "ringtones" etc etc. if i ever would be so stupid to start spamming my 7 year old strong business i would at least use titles that would make sence. anyway.
I can't do nothing about these forums, i don't own them, i can't erase them and if there are any owners, they simply don't respond.
I made a list of all the forums and send it to google but the only response they come up with is "there are still unnatural links". I hardly believe they did anything with that list i send them. I don't know what else i can do and was hoping that somebody could advice me on what to do here besides sending google messages on a daily base. cheers0 -
Emergency Help...
Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0