SEO Agency Sabotage?

[ChrisInColorado]

Here's  a strange one ...

We have a customer that has done remarkably well with organic SEO for the better part of 8 years.   We've made them tons of money with our SEO techniques.  About a year ago they started to get calls from a certain SEO firm warning that they were losing landing pages and keywords by the hundreds each month.  Revenue continued to rise so they did not think much of it.  Either did we.

My customer finally relented and hired them for some limited SEO activites in Jan/Feb of this year - unbeknownst to me.  The "other company" assembled some stats to demonstrate the drop in organic rankings, landing pages, keywords, and traffic going back about year.  This data was matched to correlate with variuos Google updates and designed to scare the customer.

Long story short and my question - has anyone ever heard of an SEO company sabotaging a potential customer so they would hire them?  We ran analysis and turns out our customer actually gained landing pages and keywords while this company was calling on them and claiming impending doom.  Turns out, since my customer brought them on, the numbers have gone way south.  Now, we look like the incompetent boobs and they will likely "fix something" to look like rock stars.

They claimed that the Penguin update is what killed the site, but the slippage started before Penguin, huh?

It would make sense to call on a prospect for a while, warn of bad stuff about to happen, make something bad happen and then say, "I told you so, hire me".

Has anyone ever hear of this?  If so, any particular tactic I should look for?

[newwhy]

We just discovered that one of our clients' sites (not one we manage, but another one of theirs) has approximately 7000 links coming from luxa.org, and they recently took a huge dip in organic traffic. Is anyone else familiar with luxa.org?

[seo-wanna-bs]

Thanks EGOL, I appreciate your kind words.

[EGOL]

I really like Paul's advice.  Deserves more than a "thumbs up".

[seo-wanna-bs]

Might be worth bringing this thread to your clients attention, to show them that the tactic the other company used to falsely gain their trust, that it isn't unheard of and is in fact common practice.

Then diagnose the issues, come up with a solid plan and offer to bring their SERPs back up to the point they were, before the new client come along.

Reinforce that for years, you proved yourself again and again and no sooner had this new company come along, their rankings drop.

To be honest, if the client still cannot see the light, walk away knowing you've done all you can. Their fate will be in the hands of the dodgy SEO company.

They'll come crawling back some day, asking for you to fix their mess.

[riplash]

As an in-house SEO I've seen a variety of attempts to scare, trick or otherwise confuse our MD into using certain companies. It never ceases to amaze me the depths to which some firms will stoop. I understand the method you speak of is a fairly common tactic amongst IT security businesses, too. Cause a problem yourselves, then become the saviour.

[seo-wanna-bs]

It's surprising the lengths some companies go to, or maybe not.

What's your relationship like with the client? Who are they blaming for the drop?

I would offer to get to the bottom of what's going on, find out what the competitor SEO company have been up to (if anything), diagnose the reasons behind the drop and fix them.

[Elchanan]

Yes, we heard that...  )-:

You right - Phone calls more often (not just when bad things happened) is a good tactic.

What we do @ Search3w is charging the hard cost money upfront and if the client decides to leave - Nothing can stop him, but we lose no money.

My tactic is to ask the client to share any emails or phone calls he gets that are SEO related directly with me (the CEO) and they trust me to provide them honest reply.

Yes, this is totally true - I told clients several times: Yes, this is a good deal. This company looks reliable, but just one thing - Keep me in the loop (for small retainer fee) to keep eyes on them. It works!