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
-
Help with facet URLs in Magento
Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
Site Migration and Traffic Help!
Hi Moz, I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return. The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shictins1 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
Building a National SEO Stratergy
Good morning Mozzers! I've just started working in-house for a local company who want to go national. I want to build a long-term strategy but the competitors all appear to be building short term strategies and I fear this is pushing the company towards following a similar approach. The competitor companies and even my company at present are trying to target "Green Widgets in TownX" and then duplicating the page and switching out TownX with TownY. Naturally there are competitors having success with this, but for how long? I really don't want to go down this route. My aim for a long term strategy would be going after "Green Widgets" and then rank naturally for "Green Widgets in TownX" with our generic green widgets page. Now if I'm told I have to go with the competitor strategy regardless of my concerns, are there any good examples of companies that have done this, without the need for being a huge brand first? I know I can obviously try to create unique content on each page and that will help prevent penalties, but it still seems a short-term strategy? Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulGG1 -
SEO Problem with PowerPoint to PDF?
Can anyone think of any reasons why it would be a bad idea to use PowerPoint to create documents and then convert them to PDFs? Do you think this could cause any crawling issues for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Title Tag Help
Hi everyone, So, I have some general question's about Title tags. My question's are as follows: 1. If i have a title tag like this 'Commercial bathroom instillation '. Will I show up for Commercial bathroom or Commercial bathroom instillation? The reason I ask is, i'm aiming for Commercial bathroom which has more search volume, but here is where the problem comes in. If I have Commercial bathroom instillation it is a more compelling title. Ideally i'm aiming for Commercial Bathroom, so im in a bit of a conundrum, as you can see. 2. My second question is if I have 'Bath Review and Shower review' for my title tag. Will I show up for Bath Review individually, and shower review individually, or only when someone search's that exact query? I hope that makes sense thanks. Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Page Titles SEO Title
Hi, I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item. I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future. Whats everyones view on this? Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique? Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great. Thanks Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillBlackburn0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0