Help to identify that this SEO agency is doing a TERRIBLE job

[Cannetastic]

Hi folks,

I am working with a group for which I do SEO etc. for one part of the group. Another part of the group hired an SEO agency to carry out their SEO for them (before I joined).

In short, they are doing a terrible job by building links in very dodgy directories (ones which get taken offline) and via machine generated 'articles' on horrendously bad 'blogs'.

Please take a look at these 'articles' and leave your thoughts below so I can back up the point that these guys are not the kind of SEOs we should be working with.

• [List of links to articles removed by moderator]

Many thanks in advance,

Gill.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi folks!

The original question in this discussion basically asks the community to condemn an SEO company. A request of this nature is a violation of both our Community Guidelines and TAGFEE Code. As such, we have removed all links that could lead to the identification of the SEO company in question; and we are closing this discussion to additional responses.

We apologize for not taking action on this sooner.

Thanks so much for your understanding!

Christy

[Cannetastic]

For sure! At least with social it's almost instantly evident when they don't know what they're doing, for SEO too much wool can be pulled over the eyes of the none technical

[julie-getonthemap]

IMO, that is the worst part of being in SEO/Social Media. There are so many providers that do a less than lousy job for their clients: making things worse, rather than better.

And even fewer people who do a good job with local.

[Cannetastic]

Thanks for the comments.

[Comment removed by moderator.]

As Igor says above, those 'articles' are terrible for these reasons:

• Spammy over optimised anchors
• Many identical anchor texts
• Zero value

On top of that the 'articles' are machine generated which I confirmed when I mystery shopped one of the 'blogs'. I assume they are hosted in bad neighbourhoods and there are not something I want to be associated with.

Need to weed out these kind of people and expose them as crooks.

Thanks again,

Gill.

[Hurf]

Yes, they're not great. As you know, backlinks like this simply have zero value; you wouldn't even want them if they were free so, they're certainly not worth investing in (with either time or money). As it stands, none of those examples are particularly toxic, nor do they appear to number in the thousands, so they'll simply end up getting ignored by Google. Thankfully, you do have a decent spread of high-quality inbound links. [Link removed by moderator.] That said, they want to put a stop to the "spammy link-building, before the balance shifts.

They've got a great-looking website. If all of the" effort"* invested in building these links was invested in building just one piece of great, link-worthy content then they'd be considerably better-off.

They need to realise that when it comes to link-building, quantity is no substitute for quality. You're absolutely right to take a stand against this, let's hope they heed your advice.

*granted, they don't represent a great deal of effort

[Cannetastic]

Agreed! Thanks very much for taking the time!

[Igor.Go]

Yes, these don't look great, to say the least. [**Comment removed by moderator.] **Anchors are spammy and all of the "optimized" anchors are coming from websites with low domain quality scores.

This is not good:
[Link removed by moderator]

I outlined two examples (there are more), see that 8 domains link to your website 55 times with an identical keyword anchor. That is as spammy as it gets and may results in being filtered.