Are we really at the mercy of anyone who wants to damage our SEO ranking?
-
I Hired a SEO specialist last December from India.. I was paying him every month and was feeling he was not doing is job. He was insuring me he was a White hat seo but in practice he was not doing anything good for my business:
-Writing low quality content
-Getting constantly refused for article and press release post
-Flooding my social media of followers who have nothing to do with my business
-Always needed to push him so he was doing is job.He insured me I would start to see some results after 3 months. But nothing. He state that he send about 10 press release and article but those are no where to be found.. is defense is always "give it a couple of months." I search google for last month result with my name. every month I was doing it and I was just seeing some little non important results.
Anyway I didnt make my payment and I block him access to all my site and social media and here is what he wrote me:
"if I don’t see $500 payment in my account by 6<sup>th</sup> May, 2014 believe me you will face consequences. You would face set back in your business, if I know White Hat very well, then I know BLACK HAT ALSO FAR MUCH BETTER. IT WOULD ONLY TAKE ME TO SETUP FEW THINGS ON THE SOFTWARES AND I WILL LINK EVERY ODD WEBSITE TO YOUR WEBSITE"
This guy is against is own rule of stating that he is a white hat SEO. My question is are we really at the mercy of those kind of Threat? Anyone can put my website down? Which recourse Do I have? I have his name, business information, photo...
-
if you agreed to pay him for services, I would satisfy that payment and then break all ties.
Sounds like this person is very vindictive. I think you are wise to get out now. To answer your question, yes there are ways to hurt a sites ranking. We only practice white hat seo at our company, but we have been approached by other seo companies to do some pretty questionable things. (We used to be an outsourcing destination for SEO) Some of the things we have seen include:
1. Using proxy servers to overwhelm a websites bandwidth,causing the server to crash
2. Setting up false citation sites with a similar or exact business name and creating false bad reviews
3. Buying up paid links from banned sites, and pointing them at the domain
and many more..Its generally best practice to not hire the people that claim to be white hat (or otherwise) seo experts. No one person is an expert at seo, we are all using what we know to be best practices. If someone promises or guarantees you anything, run away.
I agree with William on keeping an eye on your webmaster tools reports, and also change ALL your passwords. FTP, cpanel, hosting, CMS, Email, etc.
If you need any assistance, pm me. I'd be glad to help. I hate it when people get taken advantage of like this, by people that don't know what they are doing.
-
You hired the guy. He wasn't what you expected.
His articles were crap, his followers were bogus, you had to push him. You should have cancelled his services the first day you saw this stuff - even if you made a three month contract with him.
You owe him $500. Pay him. Clean up the mess.
This is really good tuition. Your smoking wallet will remind you to check the people you hire better next time, make a very short contract and keep them on a short leash.
-
The type of SEO that this individual was doing previously used to work surprisingly well before the age of Penguin. Sadly, many people who did this would call themselves "white hat". The thinking I suppose is that "black hat" stuff was using SEO tactics that were illegal or immoral such as hacking in to sites to place links. There is no official definition of what is white hat and what isn't, but what he is doing is definitely against the quality guidelines. Then again, I would say that prior to Penguin, the vast majority of SEOs were doing things that were against the quality guidelines and even now, most of them are trying to see what they can get away with.
In regards to negative SEO, Google is really good at figuring out when a site is being blasted by negative SEO and just discounting those links. However, I do believe that it is possible to do harm to a site via negative SEO if the site's backlink profile is already unnatural. Unfortunately, if you've been having links created via articles and other self made links then you could already be at risk for damage the next time that Penguin refreshes. And, if Google manually reviews your site (which could happen if the disgruntled SEO files a spam report on you) then you could get a manual penalty.
What I would do if I were in your shoes is look at all of your backlinks and identify which ones were created by this team. Any link that was made for SEO purposes and not naturally earned is unnatural. Put each of these in a disavow file and disavow them on the domain level. I'd also keep an eye on new links that Google picks up each month and add new unnatural links to your disavow file. If he's threatening to do this soon to you then you may want to keep an eye on things weekly.
-
If he didn't know what he was talking about when he said he was doing white hat, I doubt he knows when he's doing black hat-wise.
What he's referring to is most likely a blog comment or forum blast. If your website is relatively established, this isn't likely to have an effect on you.
You can monitor your links through Google Webmasters, and if you see sudden spikes in links, start actively disavowing those links or hire a more trustworthy SEO to do that job. I would recommend someone with references, examples, and local (or at least a native English speaker, it's tough to create good content in a language you don't know well).
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
-
Magento SEO question
Hello Moz Community, I am wondering if these magento settings are correct for seo. www.domain.com 301 > www.domain.com/main-language www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword (index & follow) www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword/shopby/size-m (index & follow & canonicalized to www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword) All layered navigation links are no-follow
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
How does this rank? - a page that is 301 redirected
How does a 301ed page rank in google? In google I searched for" ikea.ca" which is set up as a 301 redirect to www.ikea.com/ca/en and was surprised to see the url --> www.ikea.ca actually ranking. IKEA Canada <cite>ikea.ca/</cite>IKEA Featuring Scandinavian modern style furniture and accessories. Include storage options, lighting, decor products, kitchen appliances and beds. Bedroom - Kitchen - Living Room - IKEA North York
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
Varicose Veins Just Not Ranking
Buonjourno from 6 degrees C damn cold wetherby UK 🙂 This page http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ has remained stubbornly out of the Google rankings for target term "Varicose Veins" Heres what Ive done so far:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
1. Made sure the HTML is optimised for the target term
2. Linked from the home page via a scrolling footer Now i'm not looking for a page 1 result but I'm curious to know why the term hasnt even touched the unexplored backwaters of even page 3. p.s If there is a canonical problem please tell me how you diagnosed that 🙂 Thanks in advance, David NB - Just spotted this page can be access via 2 different URLS (Uppercase W being the difference) http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/
http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/What-are-they/0 -
Sudden drop in rankings
Hi there, I've been working on this site for three or four months (it was a brand new site), and we were seeing some really great improvements in rankings. I've concentrated on writing lots of good quality content and building a network of links through blogging and social networks. Then, last weekend (6th October), we got completely wiped off of the results. We went from rankings 2,3 and 4 for our target terms to not being in the top 100. I assumed we'd been given a penalty from Google as we'd been SEOing too hard and removed a reciprocal links page we had and asked Google to reconsider. I just got a message back saying there hasn't been any manual penalty, so it's just down to the algorithm. I'm running am SEOMoz analysis, but so far it's just coming up with things like page titles too long and too many links on pages, which I can fix, but don't seem like something that would completely destroy us so abruptly. I think we really have the most and best content on the subject of becoming a model, which has taken a great deal of effort to put tgether, so this is crushing. If anybody can shed any light, I'll be extremely grateful, and I'd be interested to knwo if anyone else has experienced anything similar. Thanks in advance! URL: www.modellingadvice. info Kat
Technical SEO | | Katja1230 -
Frustrating Local Seo Question
I have just lost the top stop on Google Places (Pack 7) for one of my clients. The company that took it came out of nowhere to take the top stop. Now I don't mind getting out ranked when someone has worked hard to out rank me but what is frustrating is this site scores terrible across the board on just about every score that is supposed to determine on and off page ranking factors. The only place it outscores is in the link department but the site is so new there is no data available in OSE. The site has 0's and 1's for PA, MR and MT plus the keyword (kitchen remodeling) that it is taking the top spot for scores and F in the SEOMoz on page report card while the page that I optimized for this very same keyword scores an A. Plus this site has zero citations according to Bright Local Data. What Gives? Here is a little bit of data: Keyword: Kitchen Remodeling My Clients website is http://www.tandmkitchens.com Competitors website: http://www.njkitchendesigns.com I'm kicking his butt in every category except Domain Age and inbound link total, his inbound link total is 409 but it's only from 2 domains.
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Any thoughts on how this is possible would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all and Merry Christmas!
Gary1 -
What are the SEO implications of using Interstitials?
Hi, I want to implement an interstitial similar to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defaultinterstitial.cms. Within few seconds it gets redirected to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/. What are the SEO implications of having this sort of arrangement? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0