Are we really at the mercy of anyone who wants to damage our SEO ranking?

[groupemedia]

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^th 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...

[David-Kley]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[WilliamKammer]

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).