Does Anybody Know Who Interflora's SEO Company Is (Or Was)?
-
In light of the recent penalty put on the Interflora site, does anybody know who their SEO company is or was (or if they were doing it in house)?
Also, do you think SEO companies that are responsible for things like this should be named and shamed?
-
This is going to sound preachy, but I would be very slow to point fingers. Perhaps there were multiple SEO companies involved. If Branded3 was indeed their most recent SEO it doesn't mean that they were involved with the most gregarious spam. (I'm not saying that they weren't - just saying that we don't know.)
Also, I think you will find that the vast majority of effective SEO companies out there are using techniques, that, if reported, would not satisfy the Google guidelines. I challenge you to rank a flower shop number one using ONLY white hat techniques. At this point in time, with the level of effective spam that is out there, it would be very hard to do.
In my opinion, whether or not we point fingers depends on what was discussed between the SEO company and Interflora. It's possible that the agreement they had was that the company was to do all they can even if it meant bending some rules. I've had some people come and ask me to rank their sites using only completely white hat methods and I've had others come and say, "I don't care what it takes - just get it done and we'll deal with the consequences if they come." Sometimes the short term gains are worth it. Plus, until recently, most websites were not aware that you could get deindexed for pushing boundaries too much.
-
I think that it was Branded3.
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
-
Backlinks from customers' websites. Good or bad? Violation?
Hi all, Let's say a company holds 100 customers and somehow getting a backlink from all of their websites. Usually we see "powered by xyz", etc. Is something wrong with this? Is this right backlinks strategy? Or violation of Google guidelines? Generally most of the customers's websites do not have good DA; will it beneficial getting a backlinks from such average below DA websites? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
301 redirects for 3 top level domains using WP SEO Yoast
Hey Guys I have a custom built website - and a wp blog attached to this - problem is there are 3 top level domains: zenory.co.nz, zenory.com and zenory.com.au **The issue is when I enter the domain to 301 redirect I only have to enter one domain usually i enter redirect from zenory.com/blog/oldpage to zenory.com.newpage ** For eg: I have just move Phone Psychic Readings from the blog - over to the main site. However there seems to be an issue that I'm still having and trying to clean up. I'm finding backlinks there are linking to each other of my 3 domains that end up backlinking across domains, which I was told this can look as spammy to google. For eg: co.nz links many pages to com.au. I'm currently trying to clean this up at the moment - however while im in the process of this - I find myself question when I'm creating the 301 redirects from the blog - but lets say I'm on the blog for zenoy.co.nz/blog/oldblogpost and when I click on a blog post - it redirects me to zenory.com/newarticlepost - because I have redirected it to .com - how can I redirect and make sure is going back to the right domain name to save myself from having to show this cross backlinks? Would gratefully appreciate any assistance on this tricky situation. Cheers Just
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
G.A. question - removing a specific page's data from total site's results?
I hope I can explain this clearly, hang in there! One of the clients of the law firm I work for does some SEO work for the firm and one thing he has been doing is googling a certain keyword over and over again to trick google's auto fill into using that keyword. When he runs his program he generates around 500 hits to one of our attorney's bio pages. This happens once or twice a week, and since I don't consider them real organic traffic it has been really messing up my GA reports. Is there a way to block that landing page from my overall reports? Or is there a better way to deal with the skewed data? Any help or advice is appreciated, I am still so new to SEO I feel like a lot of my questions are obvious, but please go easy on me!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Is Inter-linking websites together good or bad for SEO?
I know of a website that inter-links a handful of websites together (ex- coloring.ws interlinks to a handful of other sites, including dltk-kids.com, and others). Is this negative for SEO? I was thinking about creating a few related sites and inter-linking all of them together, since they will all be relevant to each other. Any thoughts would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Influence of users' comments on a page (on-page SEO)
Do you think when Google crawls your page, it "monitors" comments updates to use this as a ranking factor? If Google is looking for social signs, looking for comments updates might be a social sign as well (ok a lot easier to manipulate, but still social). thx
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gt30 -
Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?
A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdamThompson0