I was asked by a new potential client to review the SEO reports sent to him from the SEO that I’ll be replacing. I was appalled. I absolutely could NOT believe what the other company is passing off as “SEO.” They were posting links on many, many spam link farms and calling it “link building.” I checked 22 of the sites where they got links for this potential client and all 22 of them are complete spam sites. The other “SEO” used the exact same anchor text for every link they created and obviously spent no time checking the quality of the linking sites. What a joke.
Another section of this report showed something they were calling “social marketing” which included posting “articles” to Google Knol. I checked and 87/88 of the posts the “SEO” made on this company’s behalf have been flagged as spam posts. Want to tell Google you’re a spammer? Spam one of their own properties!! What’s worse than spamming Google Knol with these articles? Posting the EXACT same articles – the ones that Google flagged as spam – on a couple dozen other sites.
They also did something called “PDF Distribution” and I was amazed to see that they were “distributing” the exact same PDF to 11 sites at the same time. Also, many of these “PDF Distribution” sites present content to Google as flat HTML, not as a PDF. All Google sees is tons of duplicate content on multiple sites. Google will make a determination which site, if any, is the original owner of the content and exclude all the rest from the listings. This means that if Google decides one of the “PDF Distribution” sites is the site that owns the content produced for the client, the client’s PDF won’t show up anywhere.
This is the EXACT thing I talk about ALL the time. The “SEO” company – that I wish I could name – is a disgrace to our industry. The company is completely shooting their client in the foot and ruining their chances of ranking competitively anytime in the near future. It’s going to take a lot of work to convince this potential client that I know what I’m talking about, I know what I’m doing, and I don’t spam because he’s trusted this other company for so long.
