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
-
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 -
Why is hosting good for SEO?
I've heard a few people mention this now. I have seen hosting packages range from £5 to £1000 per month, and I understand that each comes with their own amounts of storage space, bandwidth and all. Now I understand that page speed is important to SEO and the type of hosting will dictate your page speed, but other than this why is hosting important to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
SEO direction - help needed
Hi, I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day. Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day. New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail. The whole time we have been working to improve the site. What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work 🙂 Thanks in advance. M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark0 -
Geotargeting SEO
Hi, We are and SEO company based in Scotland and have taken on a project where the client works in the UK but has distribution in mainland Europe and the US. He currently is working off 3 websites targeted at each area Uk, US and Mainland Europe We are going to rebuild one site and have each area on the site, however we are unsure if sub folders or sub domains would work better. My personal opinion is that sub domains would be better, but I dont have information to back this Can anyone advise? Any advice on geotargeting SEO also would be appreciated! Many Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trickcreative0 -
Advanced SEO question.
Hi, I manage and do the SEO for this site: www.aerlawgroup.com. If you Google "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney", you can see I rank well (1st page). I have managed to achieve similar rankings for interior pages within the site: www.aerlawgroup.com/domestic-violence.html (Google: "Los Angeles Domestic Violence Attorney".) Here is my question. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get to the first page on Google for the search term: "Los Angeles DUI Lawyer", for the following interior page: www.aerlawgroup.com/dui.html. Is there anyway that I can pass the authority/ranking (not sure what to call it) that I have for www.aerlawgroup.com to www.aerlawgroup.com/dui.html so that internal page ranks higher for "Los Angeles DUI Lawyer"? I apologize if my question doesn't make sense. In a nutshell, I'm trying to understand if there is anyway to use the ranking I have for www.aerlawgroup.com to help me rank higher for Los Angeles DUI lawyer for the dui interior page. If not, are there any other suggestions anyone has to achieve a higher ranking? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
SEO Tools for Content Audit
Hi i'm looking for a tool which can do a full content audit for a site for instance - Find pages which: • Lack text content. • Finds pages with lengthy meta descriptions • Finds missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags . • Duplicate meta descriptions. • Find images with no alt text Are there any tools besides the ones on SEMOZ which can enable me to do a full content audit on factors like these. Or any SEO audit tools out there which you can recommend. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0