Are we really at the mercy of anyone who wants to damage our SEO ranking?
-
I Hired a SEO specialist last December from India.. I was paying him every month and was feeling he was not doing is job. He was insuring me he was a White hat seo but in practice he was not doing anything good for my business:
-Writing low quality content
-Getting constantly refused for article and press release post
-Flooding my social media of followers who have nothing to do with my business
-Always needed to push him so he was doing is job.He insured me I would start to see some results after 3 months. But nothing. He state that he send about 10 press release and article but those are no where to be found.. is defense is always "give it a couple of months." I search google for last month result with my name. every month I was doing it and I was just seeing some little non important results.
Anyway I didnt make my payment and I block him access to all my site and social media and here is what he wrote me:
"if I don’t see $500 payment in my account by 6<sup>th</sup> May, 2014 believe me you will face consequences. You would face set back in your business, if I know White Hat very well, then I know BLACK HAT ALSO FAR MUCH BETTER. IT WOULD ONLY TAKE ME TO SETUP FEW THINGS ON THE SOFTWARES AND I WILL LINK EVERY ODD WEBSITE TO YOUR WEBSITE"
This guy is against is own rule of stating that he is a white hat SEO. My question is are we really at the mercy of those kind of Threat? Anyone can put my website down? Which recourse Do I have? I have his name, business information, photo...
-
if you agreed to pay him for services, I would satisfy that payment and then break all ties.
Sounds like this person is very vindictive. I think you are wise to get out now. To answer your question, yes there are ways to hurt a sites ranking. We only practice white hat seo at our company, but we have been approached by other seo companies to do some pretty questionable things. (We used to be an outsourcing destination for SEO) Some of the things we have seen include:
1. Using proxy servers to overwhelm a websites bandwidth,causing the server to crash
2. Setting up false citation sites with a similar or exact business name and creating false bad reviews
3. Buying up paid links from banned sites, and pointing them at the domain
and many more..Its generally best practice to not hire the people that claim to be white hat (or otherwise) seo experts. No one person is an expert at seo, we are all using what we know to be best practices. If someone promises or guarantees you anything, run away.
I agree with William on keeping an eye on your webmaster tools reports, and also change ALL your passwords. FTP, cpanel, hosting, CMS, Email, etc.
If you need any assistance, pm me. I'd be glad to help. I hate it when people get taken advantage of like this, by people that don't know what they are doing.
-
You hired the guy. He wasn't what you expected.
His articles were crap, his followers were bogus, you had to push him. You should have cancelled his services the first day you saw this stuff - even if you made a three month contract with him.
You owe him $500. Pay him. Clean up the mess.
This is really good tuition. Your smoking wallet will remind you to check the people you hire better next time, make a very short contract and keep them on a short leash.
-
The type of SEO that this individual was doing previously used to work surprisingly well before the age of Penguin. Sadly, many people who did this would call themselves "white hat". The thinking I suppose is that "black hat" stuff was using SEO tactics that were illegal or immoral such as hacking in to sites to place links. There is no official definition of what is white hat and what isn't, but what he is doing is definitely against the quality guidelines. Then again, I would say that prior to Penguin, the vast majority of SEOs were doing things that were against the quality guidelines and even now, most of them are trying to see what they can get away with.
In regards to negative SEO, Google is really good at figuring out when a site is being blasted by negative SEO and just discounting those links. However, I do believe that it is possible to do harm to a site via negative SEO if the site's backlink profile is already unnatural. Unfortunately, if you've been having links created via articles and other self made links then you could already be at risk for damage the next time that Penguin refreshes. And, if Google manually reviews your site (which could happen if the disgruntled SEO files a spam report on you) then you could get a manual penalty.
What I would do if I were in your shoes is look at all of your backlinks and identify which ones were created by this team. Any link that was made for SEO purposes and not naturally earned is unnatural. Put each of these in a disavow file and disavow them on the domain level. I'd also keep an eye on new links that Google picks up each month and add new unnatural links to your disavow file. If he's threatening to do this soon to you then you may want to keep an eye on things weekly.
-
If he didn't know what he was talking about when he said he was doing white hat, I doubt he knows when he's doing black hat-wise.
What he's referring to is most likely a blog comment or forum blast. If your website is relatively established, this isn't likely to have an effect on you.
You can monitor your links through Google Webmasters, and if you see sudden spikes in links, start actively disavowing those links or hire a more trustworthy SEO to do that job. I would recommend someone with references, examples, and local (or at least a native English speaker, it's tough to create good content in a language you don't know well).
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
-
Ranking for multiple locations for the same service
I'm currently developing my brothers new website and taking care of the SEO. He provides roofing services and uPVC fascias, soffits & guttering service. He is looking to target multiple towns and cities within a region (Yorkshire). Each service has its own page but I'm wondering if it would be better to create a service page for each town with different content? It's quite difficult to re-write the service content for each town and not repeat yourself. For example, we're looking to target "roofer in leeds" "roofer in sheffield" "roofing services wakefield" etc etc Obviously it's more difficult to rank outside your physical town as the registered address is on Google maps but with content and link building we should see some results. I look forward to hearing some feedback.
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Varicose Veins Just Not Ranking
Buonjourno from 6 degrees C damn cold wetherby UK 🙂 This page http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ has remained stubbornly out of the Google rankings for target term "Varicose Veins" Heres what Ive done so far:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
1. Made sure the HTML is optimised for the target term
2. Linked from the home page via a scrolling footer Now i'm not looking for a page 1 result but I'm curious to know why the term hasnt even touched the unexplored backwaters of even page 3. p.s If there is a canonical problem please tell me how you diagnosed that 🙂 Thanks in advance, David NB - Just spotted this page can be access via 2 different URLS (Uppercase W being the difference) http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/
http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/What-are-they/0 -
What are the SEO implications of URLs that use a # in them?
I have several clients who have begun to ask questions about sites that are designed to look like a single page. When you click on a link, the URL changes but it uses a # before (i.e. http://www.kelloggs.com/teamusa**/#**/teamusa/athletes/kerri-walsh.html. What are the SEO implications of having a page set up this way? I noticed that Google has indexed this page but the indexed URL does not include a #. Is Google indexing a separate version of this page? Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Good Seo Titles
Hi. Mybsite is www.theprinterdepo.com and I am trying to find a good template for my product/page titles. Many users search our products by the product model: something like Q2121X. Some other users search by: hp 1320 printer or just 1320 printer. They will almost never search for hp 1320 new, or hp 1320 refurbished. My website is developed in magento, and we have a SEO plugin in which I can put a template for the URL and also a template for the product title. I was thinking for title and URL. title + condition + productmodel However many users search for: "refurbished printers" and maybe its better that our products say something like this: HP 1320 Refurbished Printer, instead of: HP 1320 Printer - Refurbished - Q2121X Please let me know your suggestions.
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Basic SEO HTML
Hello Everyone, One place I am weak is coding for SEO. I need to get better. One question I do have is can anyone explain why it's important to place css and java script files in an external file? How do you do this and how do you know if it's already being done? If it has not been done on a site is it hard to go back and do? I understand this is important from a site load time issue Thanks, Bill P.S. Can anyone recommend a resource where I can learn proper html coding for SEO? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Html5 in SEO
What is the convinience of using html5 for seo.As i read is not too good using many h1 in each metacontent (due to crawler alerts) , but it is good to use html5. We have follow or so this web guidelines www.tumanitas.com whtat do you think about taht?
Technical SEO | | ofuente0 -
Does daily changing of price information in a title tag damage SEO?
Hi I'm thinking about changing the title tag for all my pages daily, updating it with the most current price information. (As I think this could improve CTR) All the other keywords in the title tag would remain the same however. Does anyone think this is likely to cause a problem with regards to ranking in Google and other search engines? Thanks for any / all replies! Cheers
Technical SEO | | joeprice0 -
Why sudden change in rankings?
I have been working on a domain for site which has only been up for a few months. I have mainly been working on building trust and authority for the site, with only a few links to my keyword phrases, which I was saving for the end, and concentrating on good quality non-spammy type links. It was progressing nicely until last weekend when I went from the first page on Google to the 3rd and 4th pages. Was there some kind of update?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0