Ranking Practices by Local Major SEO Companies

[Marie Ysais]

I have been very busy lately with some fall out from the Google updates. I had gained a few new clients just before the updates and I knew they came from big local SEO firms here in my area.

When the updates began to roll out the new clients tanked in rankings. It was very evident that they were caught up in the updates and penalized. I have spent weeks digging through back links and figuring out what is triggering the penalties and cleaning up a really big mess.

I was actually sad to see what kind of SEO practices these big firms were using.

I do a back link audit when I first begin to work with the client. I document the back links and I show the client. I was able to show one particular client that they had 1,000 back links and one month later they were down to 300 back links. The site absolutely tanked and is left with only poor directory back links.

Turns out they were the lucky ones because I had another client that had site wide back links that were indexed after I began working with the client. I was able to pin point the site wide links and email the SEO company and ask for them to be deleted. This links were deleted with in two days. In the mean time the website is no longer any where near the first page for their keywords.

Another tactic I discovered was creating Resource pages on all of their client's websites and placing back links of all of their clients. These links were low quality garbage so I wrote to them to ask for them to be removed. I must have touched a nerve because not only did they remove my client's links but they removed all of the links from the page. You can see one of their pages here: http://www.acefireequipment.<wbr>com/resources/
My guess is the page will be set back up again but with a different URL since I found the first one. This is just one example of many many many more.

What makes me sad is these are not our domains. We work on other people's domains and some of them have had their domains for many years. By using bad SEO practices you can ruin a companies rankings but also have their domain penalized that may not be able to be recovered. Hard working individuals that paid for SEO services to achieve their first page rankings are no longer visible in Google. This can actually really hurt their bottom line and some businesses may not be able to recover.

If you build back links build them with care and realize this isn't your domain. Real people are behind these domains and they depend on the business their website brings.

 

[baltimoreseocompany]

Yup..practice is shady. I took over new client from local consultant(my direct competitor) .. My Client was stuck with 1 year contract - as soon as contract over, he move all the seo work to me. As soon as he moved, former SEO guy start removing links from his niche blog(in this case Attorney)..

I mean he paid for full year SEO service, now he is removing stupid few links from his private blog network because he left? Now that's not honest service.

Of course, one of my client site is gone after update..

 

[bhartzer]

One of the shady practices by local "SEOs" has still been working for years and years: add a 'resource' type of links list to each client site. In this case, though, the internal links to those resource links list pages are linked from the footer, in the copyright notice.

The links are actually only one letter of a word, and the anchor text changes monthly or on a regular basis. In fact, this is such a shady SEO practice that the SEO firm even charges clients for this "service".

After all these years, I am amazed that a law firm in Denver can actually help the rankings of a carpet cleaning company in Florida. But apparently because the anchor text of those pages aren't "resources" or "links" but they're a mix of various one letter anchor text words, this spam still works.