How do i determine if an SEO person i hired is good and should continue on

[btrinh]

I know SEO is important and i am hiring an SEO person, as well as company. however, they both seem to contradict each other and so im lost as to know who is good and bad. what should i look for in their work report, and what questions should i ask.

Background:

i have tried to read alot (100+ articles) on the new panda and penguin so at least i know what people are talking about without being clueless. So my site got hit recently with the updates and got penalised, and i think that is predominantly because of the backlink profiles, before being built too much around keywords. so my understanding is that backlinking now should be natural, diverse (many alt tags instead of a few), concentrate on branding and less on keywords.

The person: she believes in branding, and acknowledge the problem with my previous backlink profile. so now she said the backlink ratio should be around 40-50% based on the brand. so she has been doing alot of backlinks wtih alt tags for my website url, name, as well as my name. She said once that ratio is close to that target of 40-50% i should see a jump in ranking, which woudl be in around a month of work. but here is my concern

1 - the other company said she is spamming, which kinda scarred me already

2 - while in principle, what she has said is backed up by my reading materials, it seems she only concentrate on three alt texts so far, my url, my business name, and my name. i thought they need to be diversified

3 - the links seem to come from alot of places. she said it does not need to be high quality now as we just need to get that ratio/profile correct, and then we can concentrate on the high quality links later. she is doing around 40 links per day. which apparently take 8 hours per day.

4 - i guess i worry that that if all these new links suddenly become spams later, does that mean i woudl need to either build more links to offset the more spam links, or have to spend more time removing bad links

Please advise. is she performing spamming. how do i check her links/works. is there a tool. is it wise to build more links, or is it better to identify previous bad links and remove them?

Thank you for your help.

[btrinh]

Thank you so much Lynn. it has helped so much for my understanding of reading these data, as well as seo. I will definitely take these knowledge to my future sites as well. loosk like natural linkings is the way to go

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Well you have started on the right track with moz and the other tools! Personally I would take a step back from the link building and get a good grounding in the basics first. The moz beginner guide is a great place to start.

In regards your link profile, the moz metrics can be a bit deceptive if you have done a lot of link building in comparison to your competitors, the authority numbers can be somewhat inflated even though the links are not high value (and indeed are even hurting you). Your link profile to me looks problematic, especially the non www which has quite a few linking texts which seem completely unrelated to your site (check the anchors cloud in the ahrefs links above). Is this the reason for your ranking problems? Maybe and there is a good chance you will need to try to get rid of some of those links if possible. Might be worth asking whoever built these links if it is possible to unwind some of them, but this is a whole different conversation and worth a separate qa question where someone with more experience in getting rid of bad links might jump in with more specific advice.

What I can certainly say now is I would stop the link building you are currently doing as it looks problematic and there is no point in making it even worse. Then go through the moz guide, get a good grounding in the basics and in the first instance concentrate on building links from relevant sources from your offline world. What I mean is incorporate your real world contacts and actions with your site, register your business/site with relevant local business directories or local photography groups for example. Be a normal business with normal business activities in other words and incorporate these when relevant to a link here or there. There is no 'acceptable' rate of link building, but honestly for a local wedding photography site a 'natural' rate could be only a link or two a week! 40 a day is simply asking for a penalty, why would a site like this be getting so many links if not to try and game the search engines?

Hope that helps!

[btrinh]

thank you lynn.

so i have joined up seomoz, and other places to get reports on the backlinking profile. so my page authority is much higher than the competition, im no where on the first page on a lot of keywords, so im just trying to figure out what is the problem.

1- according to cognitiveseo, i have 39% links that are unnatural, and my domain alt tags is only 23%. but then

but everything else seems ok. so does mean my link profile is the main problem here? what woudl be an acceptable rate of link building per days. i assume if i was to concentrate on natural link buildings from now on, targeting on high quality backlinks only, it will be safer in the long run and results would eventually shown?

[LynnPatchett]

Hmm thats a point re the non www vs www. That being said, there are still a fair amount of new domains linking to the non www version also. Generally, I would not like the looks of that link profile one little bit. In all honesty, I would pause that link building until you get a better handle on what is being done vs what you need to be getting done. As Maximise points out, you might well have a real slog to get rid of the bad links later on, so don't make it any worse now.

In regards ahrefs generally backlinks are individual linking pages and domains are individual linking domains (could be one or more pages on that domain linking, its still one domain). I would look at the new/lost domains and then click on a day and look underneath to see the newly found linking domain. If most of the domains are crap directories, spam comments and generally low value links, then you do not want them.

[btrinh]

oh right, thank you kindly for clearing that up. its great to know.

[Maximise]

No this isn't a problem because all the www requests for your site are being correctly 301 redirected to the non www version. But all the links being built for the www version will also count for the non www version.

[btrinh]

interesting. so you are saying  i need to remove one or the other right? this is bad as google is splitting my ranking juice across the two sites?

[Maximise]

Lynn posted a link where lit looks like you are losing links but have a look at this version:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.ppp.net.nz

It looks like your SEO is building links to www.ppp.net.nz instead of ppp.net.nz and the link acquisition rate shown above is definitely going to look unnatural.

Low quality links are not worth the hassle. if you are building 40 a day that is most likely going to end up in links that you have to try remove in the future which is much, much harder work. I've spent months cleaning up a link profile before Google lifted the penalty.

[btrinh]

Hi Lynn thank you for your reply. ok in all honesty, i am not an seo person. i do try to educate as much as i can so i can say seomthing here and there, but not im not an expert.

i have tried to use ahrefs, but i dont know what the data means. if i may, what is domains, in comparison to backlinks? and i looked at the new/lost for backlinks and i seem to be loosing lots of backlinks as well. but coudl this be spam comments via Wordpress?

i know we have not been getting rids of bad links at all. she said in order to change the backlink profile to about 50% ratio of brand link to others, she tries to get that number of brandlinks up with the alt tag targetting the url and brand name. so is that true? to get that ratio correct first before I can see any movement in the ranking in seo? i do lots of blogs, my social media linking seems to be ok, but the backlinks is what killing me, because of what previously has been done. so she is determined that we need to fix this profile first. i have read in several places the the alt tag distribution must now be less on keywords and more on brands. so i guess in principle she seems correct. but i just worry she is building brand profile through more badlinks, which might give me short term benefits, but probablywill kill my page later on.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

As the others say I would be concerned. You can get an idea of what is going on by using ahrefs, the free account will give you some basic data on new links so you have a rough idea. Check here: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/ppp.net.nz

That being said, the link profile does not look like what you would expect with a link building campaign like you describe going on, both total links and linking domains seems to have a significant downward trend, unless at the same time as building your links you are actively trying to get rid of previous bad links? Either way, if you have a look at the newly obtained domains report here: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains-new/subdomains/ppp.net.nz you are not going to see very much quality in there! Directories from all over the world, some comment links etc.... thats not a good link profile, watch out!

[btrinh]

hi doug, this is what I am afraid of as well. especially with the new updates which seems to only want quality and natural linkings, hence my fear. my website is ppp.net.nz.

[btrinh]

Would it be useful to post up the excel sheet as to what has been done?

my website is www.ppp.net.nz.  thank you.

[DougRoberts]

From what you've said it I'd be concerned.

40 links / day sounds aggressive and almost certainly low value (and potentially risky) links. If your site has been penalised in some way I strongly suspect that this is more likely to be digging you a bigger hole than helping you to recover.

You've got to understand the reason why you've been penalised and what's caused it. (Have you had any Google Webmaster tools warnings?)

Looking at you backlink profile and making assumptions that you can fix things by throwing more links at it doesn't say "robust recovery strategy" to me.

If the other company are saying she's "spamming" what do they suggest you do?

If you're happy to tell us your website then I'm sure someone would take a look. (If you'd rather, I'd be happy to take a quick look if you want to send me a private message with your site details in.)

[Maximise]

I would be very concerned with this strategy. If they are building 40 links per day then these are almost certainly going to be low quality and artificial looking links. The anchor text of a link is not the only way that Google judges if a link is artificial or not. You could be digging yourself into a much bigger hole. I also think the general consensus is that branding should be higher than 50%, maybe around the 70% - 80% mark.

Personally I would focus on obtaining some high quality, authoritative links and at the same time try to remove as many of the spam links as possible.