Beware cheap SEO offers from cold-callers!

How often do we hear or use the phrase “I might as well give it a try, I’ve got nothing to lose”.  Well, in the following instance, the reality was very different.

We recently took-over an SEO account from another agency (one of the low-cost, we promise you the earth, take your money and tell you nothing crowd), as the client was seeing his search rankings dropping rather than rising, which as you can imagine was not quite what they were expecting.

Anyway, after loading the website into our SEO research tools, we noticed that there were a number of inbound links which were “spammy” links (on websites that were not relevant to the client’s industry with poor authority), and full of keyword anchor text. These links were having a negative effect on the performance of the client’s site, as Google was viewing them as “bad neighbourhood” links, simply used for false SEO boosting (which is exactly what they were).

After a bit of searching, we discovered that ALL these linked websites were built by a company in India, however none of them really looked properly finished. So we Googled this Indian company’s name, and found dozens of UK websites for companies all in the same or similar industries, all of which were incomplete or copies.

It turned-out that this Indian company was actually a fake company, building fake websites, with the sole intention of using them for paid link-building purposes. This is about the worst example of bad SEO practice that we’ve seen so far, and just re-enforces what we say in our article entitled How to spot SEO “Snake-oil” Salespeople on the SEO page of our website.

It’s now taken us a good deal of time to get these bad links removed, and I suspect it’s cost the client more for us to remove them than he paid the other SEO Agency to put them on in the first place. But now we have the task of getting his website back up on Google, which is going to take some time.

As the saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true….