Threatening SEO practice
-
Hi all,
We have just taken on a site that has had SEO done for 3 years by a different company, but now that company is threatening the client to ruin their site with bad links, and get their site banned.
I understand through Webmaster tools that you can monitor backlinks, and file a reconsideration request, but is there any other non-time consuming way of stopping this to start with?
Hope someone can shine some light on the very unprofessional practice
Thanks
Neil
-
Hi, this was very helpful! Is there anything else besides bad links that one should be concerned with that could potentially hurt the ranks? I'm using the OSE to keep track of newly discovered backlinks. Although our old-SEO company hasn't threaten to do such a thing, they've shown signs of being a bit shady in the past... so I rather monitor for the next year or so (to be on the safe side). Thank you
-
Sounds like you have been 100% validated in your decision to change SEO firm! Just imagine the tactics they were using when you were paying them
I would echo the comments above - stay vigilant for spammy link warning within Google Webmaster Tools and add any poor quality links that you find to a disavow file.
Its staggering that your old agency would rather put time, money & effort into harming an old client rather than finding a new one
-
Thanks Michael & Tom,
Thats a great help, and I hope this other company is just full of hot air, and do nothing like Michael says.
Thanks again
-
I'd recommend this as well. Unfortunately, there's not much else you can do in this position.
Take advantage of OSE's "just discovered" section and, if you have access to them, combine with the "fresh links" section of MajesticSEO and/or Ahrefs.
Add them in to the file and upload your disavow.
-
I would monitor the links in OSE. Any whiff of dubious links disavow the domain, any more disavow the new domain etc, etc. They will soon get tired of wasting their resources, if indeed they carry out their threat in the first place.
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
-
What is the importance of anchor text in seo? And how does it relate to a ranking keyword?
i have one dilema if i put targeted keyword in the anchor text(backlink), is that how i am gonna rank for that keyword? i am new to the community. need help and lets say if thats true what will happen in these given cases? case1 site:a has 100 linking domains from 1000 backlinks and they have 100 anchor texts which are all same case 2 site:b has 100 linking domains from 1000 backlinks and they have 50 anchor texts which are all same which one will rank better?
Whiteboard Friday | | calvinkj1 -
How to Build SEO Focused Pages?
Your help please as with so much kicking around about what is best practice us poor novices havent got a chance to keep up! My site www.over50choices.co.uk focuses on personal finance for the over 50s and one of the product sets is Funerals: I have c40 pages on the subject and 25 pages with the word "funeral" (eg funeral plans, how to arrange a funeral, funeral directors, funeral planning etc) in the URL, Title & H1 Tag - individually each page explains specific elements of the "process" and solutions to them eg purchasing a "prepaid funeral plan" all of which were optimised for specific Keywords (because thats what i was advised was best practice 6 months ago). Am I correct in thinking that in the new world ie post Hummingbird et al, that a better strategy is to use the "product home page" as the core landing page, with sufficient content to summarise what's on offer, covering all of the individual subjects from each pages in an umbrella/topic kind of way? And to still retain the linked pages from the core landing page, as they will contain the detailed information? Many thanks Ash
Whiteboard Friday | | AshShep10 -
Should ebook content be a download or hosted on site for SEO?
We have written ebook(s) on subjects of interest to our prospects (B-C market). We have taken many recurring questions asked over the years plus helpful graphics and put into short 12+ page ebooks. After filling out form to receive ebook- (first name & email on form) for any option below- Should we: a) send them to Landing page to download ebook to their desktop? b) send them e-mail with link to download ebook? c) send them directly to page on our site with the ebook content? d) something else? My thoughts are to do c) which will put content on site, though 'protected' via gate. This way the search engines can crawl the content. However, if that content is not directly reachable through menu will that degrade the importance of that content? Obviously we want to provide good, helpful information to prospects. We would also love to benefit from that content from a Search point of view if possible. Anyone have experience with this through A/B test or otherwise? Thanks, Steve
Whiteboard Friday | | PhotographerSteve0 -
Local SEO Citation Questions
I have checked out some great resources from Rand and others here on SEOMoz, as well as some other great articles written on YouMoz by you guys! I have two questions when it comes to citations for Local SEO though. I have heard that Google does not really take the address into consideration when indexing local citations. Instead it is a combination of the business name + phone number + area code. On one hand this makes a lot of sense as far as Google crunching all the information. You can achieve a fairly accurate citation with just those three things and still weed out a lot of the "brand mentions" as citations. However this conflicts with a lot of what I have been reading and watching as far as whiteboard Fridays and blogs here on SEOMoz. Can someone provide some insight or sources concerning this? Secondly, in case of SEO and Web Design companies, such as ourselves, who do not receive the "One Box" for Google localized search, do citations play any lesser role in ranking for localized seo keywords? I am not sure if there is a definitive answer to these questions or if they are open ended. Regardless any insight would be invaluable!
Whiteboard Friday | | KesilConsultingLLC0 -
Responsive Website Without Losing SEO Benefits
Hi All, I have been asking questions pertaining to making a site mobile friendly without jeapordizing the benefit of SEO. However, I have been suggestion ways to do it; So, I would like to broadly pose the question and receive advise on how some of the professionals would go about making changes or not. I have a site that is going pretty strong for some keyword on all search engines, it is Yahoo hosted and was created with SiteBuilder, wtihout losing any SEO Benefit I wouldl ike to know if this was your company how you would go about making the site responsive to mobile, ipads, etc... thanks Jim
Whiteboard Friday | | jimmy02250 -
GEO TAG Images for local SEO
Hello, In the pro webinar "All About Google Places – Do’s, Don’t, Best Practices and More" Benu recomends to geo tag pictures. I'm bad with coding and using joomla. Can somebody give me a step by step guide ? For now I use this code: What do I have to ad? I want to have the picture asociated with barcelona. What do you recomend? Use regional code Microformat I found this in wikipedia ; In case you recomend me to use this. Where does it go exactly? Thanks for help
Whiteboard Friday | | igrizo0 -
Is there a better map buidling platform than Google Maps for SEO purposes?
I'm about to publish a blog post and white paper on the Sierra Wine Country (over 100 wineries in the mountains between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe) to my website http://thingsyoushoulddo.com. I'd like to provide an embeddable map. Last week in the whiteboard Friday, Rand talked about how a vimeo embed could link directly back to your website vs. a youtube embed that leads back to youtube. Is there anything similar in the map creation world?
Whiteboard Friday | | juliemarg0 -
Local SEO- Multiple businesses at one address
Rand was talking about the importance of address format being exactly the same across all citations in last week's WBF http://www.seomoz.org/blog/local-seo-checklist-for-new-sites-whiteboard-friday. But what about business name? I have two unrelated businesses at the same address and am in the process of updating/adding citations for each. Will duplicate citations (identical addy, different business name) harm my Places ranking? Any suggestions? David
Whiteboard Friday | | watkinsheating0