9 replies to this topic

[stillandbox]

I was doing my own SEO for about 2 years with really good results. I rose to number 1 or 2 for 6 keywords. As my company grew, I had new keywords I wanted to target and less time to do it myself. I hired an SEO company to help me out. I researched them extremely well, but I feel that they are just giving me spammy links instead of the high quality links from sites in my industry.

For intense, they did social bookmarking for me on diigo. They created a new user name and added 2 links to my site. Diggo has a PR of 7, their direct link has a PR of 0. My SEO told me it was a PR of 7 and counted towards my guarantee of 5 PR7 per month.

They also created a bunch of PR2 domains that are designed to look like college websites. They are all PR2's. The websites are 100% spam and just links embedded into useless, meaningless text.

I asked my SEO if this is what I was paying them for. They replied "Better links will come, it takes time".

I feel these are just spam links. I do not want spam links. I'd rather have 1 quality link that 10K spam links. Am I correct? Or is this just a side to SEO I've never been familiar with. I have an extremely legitimate and reputable company. I don't want to get hurt with Big G with crappy spammy links.

BTW, it's been 4 months and NONE of the keywords he's working on have made it to page 2.

Thanks!

[qwerty]

Are they doing anything other than link building?

[Jill]

Yes it sure sounds like they're ripping you off.

[stillandbox]

I had done my own onsite optimization. They touched up a few things, but nothing that took more than an hour do to over 35 pages.

These fake "college" pages they are making....am I wrong or they do nothing for me correct? I assume even with a PR of 2, they have no TrustRank and don't really do anything but make me look like a spam site.

[chrishirst]

I have this feeling of deja vu and hearing the words "Traffic" and "Power" over and over again. I wonder what is causing that?

[Jill]

You need to get rid of them ASAP and all that they did for you. Get your money back too.

[qwerty]

The fake college sites aren't helping. Don't even concern yourself with toolbar PR. Links from educational sites are generally valuable because educational sites are generally pretty authoritative. If pages on those sites have decent toolbar PR, it's usually because their home pages have rather high PR and it gets distributed to the internal pages, and sometimes numerous internal pages do pretty well too.

But the important thing is that the web sites of colleges are authorities because colleges are authorities. The fake site of a fake college is no better than the fake blog of a fake blogger.

[Michael Martinez]

Did you ask them at the beginning what they would do? It sounds like they are providing you with a list of linking resources they are creating for you. If you knew in advance that they would be building Websites for links you're really not in a position to claim they are ripping you off. If they promised you number 1 rankings with these kinds of links, that would be misleading. But if you went looking for a link BUILDER and hired a link BUILDER then you should not be upset at the low value of the links they BUILT.

[stillandbox]

I did ask them & it's lined out in my contract. They were doing onsite SEO, which they only needed to do a minimal amount of anyways. They were also going to build "high quality links" they "guarantee no spam links will be produced." Both are quotes from their contract. They were NOT a cheap company. I did NOT know in advance that they would be building websites. I had showed the owner the type of links that I had built myself in the past. He stated that was the exact work they would do for me.

I looked for an SEO company & thought I hired one. I actually hired a scam.

[qwerty]

Here's the problem with the two phrases you're quoting: they're both matters of opinion. Does the contract stipulate that the links would be what you consider "high quality" and not what you consider "spam"? It's pretty clear, based on what you've told us, that those of us who have commented in this thread would disagree with the claim that these are high quality links and not spam, but there are no legal definitions of those terms. Frankly, they don't belong in a contract without a lot of clarification.

Yeah, I think you got scammed, but apart from getting them to stop doing what they're doing, I doubt you're going to be able to get anything out of them (such as a refund). You should certainly ask (strongly) for your money back, but we all know they're going to refuse, insisting they've fulfilled their contractual obligation. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know how much money you've spent on this, but I wouldn't feel confident in telling you that suing them is going to get you any satisfaction.

Edited by qwerty, 13 July 2012 - 07:15 PM.