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
-
Multi Store SEO Drop
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations. I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
What is the best SEO way for a shop
Hi there ! A client want to sell some products on its future website but just a small range (the most part of this website will not be an online shop). The idea is to add a "shop" button in the menu to redirect clients in this shop. I would like your opinion about how should I construct this shop, what do you think is the best for SEO : "www.website.com/shop" or "shop.website.com" thank you in advance for your answers !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnjinFrance0 -
Canonical Tag help
Hello everyone, We have implemented canonical tag on our website: http://www.indialetsplay.com/ For e.g. on http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=42 we added canonical as http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=all (as it showcase all products) Our default page is http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers Is canonical tag implementation right? Or we need to add any other URL. Please suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
Need help for improving SEO App?
Please refer our guru99 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vector.guru99&hl=en We have tons of free materials related to SAP in the app. The problem we are facing is we do not rank for terms like SAP or SAP tutorial and discovery is an issue I have searched over the internet and found no concrete solution. Can you experts help ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chirag7530 -
Help!!! Am I being Attacked???
Hello, I do not believe so much in spammy links attacks and I definitely do not believe my site is worth attacking. However, I'm seeing new links pointing to my site that I have no idea where they come from. I just spotted three articles on a poor crappy article site with exact match keywords point to me. The articles are completely unique (copyscaped them) and they were posted according to the site time stamp during Oct and Nov 2012. (And they Appear in the WMT recently discovered links from more or less the same time). What to do (besides for disavowing this domain)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
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 -
SEO for Log in Sites
Hello, I just lunched a website where you have to sign up and to log in in order to use it. So I have the home, also a blog but then the rest of the pages are let's say it "hidden".How would you do the seo for it? I have been cheking facebook, foursquare and some others and they use different approaches. Facebook uses the same description in every single page for example. My site is similar to foursquare users have profile, stats, history, ranking. Well, what is your advice?? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome0