SEO Rip-Off?

I've been quoted by a member of the forum to "review of what changes are required to improve ranking for your website." This was paid for on the 5/9. This is a respected member of the forum with over 5200 posts and thanked over 1150 times so I though he would be OK.

Emails are acknowledged as received but not replied to whilst phones are not answered and messages not replied to. I'm beginning to think I've been snied.:mad:
 

webgeek

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May 19, 2009
4,091
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What was the agreed turnaround time for the work? Some sites quote 60 days for doing a site audit.

Then again, sometimes life (or death or illness) can get in the way.

Too many possibilities, all conjecture.

A registered lettered to their companies house business address, asking for an update and the date they expect to deliver services might be in order.

Save any thought of being threatening until you know you've been jacked, then call John over at JJ Collect and see if he has any good advice or services to handle this for you. He's been simply amazing and is someone I'll stick my neck out for and recommend personally.
 
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No time limit was quoted but I did ask for an estimate but not given. Seeing as he offers a Free SEO audit and I'm paying I think over a month is a bit strong for what is essentially a couple of hours work for an experienced operator.

If there was a life and death situation surely a simple email would be possible and acceptable.
 
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I could tell you at least 4 posters on here that I would run a mile from having been pissed around by them

Just because someone posts a lot and his or her chums get in the habit of clicking thanks does not mean a heck of a lot.

I was on another forum and was told only 2 days ago to show someone more respect as they had a 1000 posts more than me, they were not aware that the person I was chastising is my rep!
 
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....Just because someone posts a lot and his or her chums get in the habit of clicking thanks does not mean a heck of a lot......

Point taken but I was not expecting the forum to vouch for the guys integrity - I was looking at his technical ability and from the agreement he received on his posts from other posters gave me the impression he knew what he was talking about. "SEO experts" are the new "Double Glazing salesmen"
 
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"SEO experts" are the new "Double Glazing salesmen"

Absolutely!!!

I run a business and we have four competitors in our country. If you google our business and country, you will find either ourselves or one of our competitors at the top of the google rankings.

Neither of us could give a damn about search engine optimisation! Neither of us do a damn thing to 'optimise' anything. We just have good and content-rich sites.

SEO does not equal profit. It does not equal turnover or even (shock-horror) clicks.

All this asinine fretting over SEO is complete and utter hogwash. Google employs people and people have eyeballs and if they think your site is worthy of pushing up the list, that is exactly what will happen.
 
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I was looking at his technical ability and from the agreement he received on his posts from other posters gave me the impression he knew what he was talking about.
You're assuming the majority is always right... foolish and poor business sense...

In any case, there is no indication that he doesn't know what he's doing as he apparently hasn't done anything yet! :rolleyes::p
"SEO experts" are the new "Double Glazing salesmen"
Comments like that are unlikely to endear you with those who may be able to help...
 
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makeusvisible

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  • Jan 23, 2011
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    Absolutely!!!


    Neither of us could give a damn about search engine optimisation! Neither of us do a damn thing to 'optimise' anything. We just have good and content-rich sites.

    If you don't do anything to optimise how do you know you are not missing out out potential business via your site. For example, slightly tweaking your content on a particular page could massively reduce your bounce rate, or increase your conversion rate.

    If you are not actively monitoring what your visitors are doing, and how they are engaging with your website, then any improvements (or content) you add are purely just a stab in the dark.
     
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    Comments like that are unlikely to endear you with those who may be able to help...

    Sorry if I offend you but if the cap fits - bloody wear it or do something about it. Continually getting emails that my site needs work, guarantees of No1 placement, badly optimised, blah, blah blah.

    If someone can glance at my site and tell me it is rubbish then surely a paid for audit should not take 6 weeks.
     
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    F

    Faevilangel

    Sorry if I offend you but if the cap fits - bloody wear it or do something about it. Continually getting emails that my site needs work, guarantees of No1 placement, badly optimised, blah, blah blah.

    If someone can glance at my site and tell me it is rubbish then surely a paid for audit should not take 6 weeks.

    but these are foreign based companies who don't look at the websites, they just spam email addresses with the same message.

    There could be hundreds of reasons why the person hasn't done the work, from being ill or even involved in an accident, things happen. Not a lot you can do except keep trying to contact them.
     
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    ...do something about it.
    What would you have me do...? I don't even know who you hired... :rolleyes:
    Continually getting emails that my site needs work, guarantees of No1 placement, badly optimised, blah, blah blah.
    That's called spam. I get various offers through the post for double glazing, wall cladding and solar panels. I just recycle them. I suggest you do the same...
    If someone can glance at my site and tell me it is rubbish then surely a paid for audit should not take 6 weeks.
    Any solicitor will tell you that if time is of the essence then it should be specified in the contract. Is the SEO industry as a whole responsible for your poor purchasing/specification procedures...?

    From your description, you appear to have had poor service, but one has to ask why you'd hand over money on the basis you describe...

    Maybe pick up the phone and talk the the guy/gal concerned and find out what's happening...

    If you can't get a response, then perhaps name them on here - without the emotional outbursts - and see if you can get them to respond publicly...
     
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    There could be hundreds of reasons why the person hasn't done the work, from being ill or even involved in an accident, things happen.
    If he/she is active on the forum, then this would seem unlikely.

    I would suggest that if the OP has tried to contact them by various means, then a letter before action followed by a small claims for return of the money, plus costs might be appropriate... Undoubtably cost more than it's worth, but might give the OP some satisfaction...
     
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    Absolutely!!!

    I run a business and we have four competitors in our country. If you google our business and country, you will find either ourselves or one of our competitors at the top of the google rankings.

    Neither of us could give a damn about search engine optimisation! Neither of us do a damn thing to 'optimise' anything. We just have good and content-rich sites.

    SEO does not equal profit. It does not equal turnover or even (shock-horror) clicks.

    SEO has an importance, a very big one for a business that actually cares about making a decent income.

    But i agree, most people who call themselves SEO's or profess to be good at it are generally not that good at it.

    Ok, so you have 4 competitors. Which one ranks number 1? They will be the ones getting the most traffic and making the most money from their website, provided the site doesn't look like a turd. The traffic tails off drastically as you go down the listings. So using your example, you may have got onto the front page due to it being an uncompetitive industry with very few competitors but there is still scope for meaningful SEO.
     
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    Perhaps I should have written 'real' competitors. The five businesses in our branch have literally hundreds of other companies tailing them that are largely fly-by-night small operations that seem to be moving heaven and Earth to get up the Google rankings. These are the ones that spam all over forums, send out copious amounts of emails and pay for sexy websites with loads of fly-overs and things that move.

    In the EU, there are probably about some 7,000 such businesses, but only some 100-plus manage to earn any money.

    Could we do better? Yes. Will we improve our website? Yes, but only when we have made improvements in our business. As we do not believe in credit, these improvements take time. The worst website is one that makes a massive promise that the underlying business cannot fulfil.

    By all means, let those that want to, indulge themselves in SEO measures if it floats somebody's boat, but too often, it is taken as the be-all and end-all of doing business today. All it is, is yet another box that a businessman or woman has to tick. It is far from being as important as cash-flow (Cash-Floe, Gadd how I loved that woman!) or tax returns or costing or sensitivity analysis or dozens of other things. Let's start with having good staff who put in a genuine eight-hour day, are paid properly and love their work.

    I think that this is all part of the growing tendency for total numpties to try to enter business. SEO may be important to some types of businesses, BUT it is not a silver bullet.

    The numpty brigade are always looking for magic 'Zoom Pills' that provide an instant solution, instead of getting down to basics. You name it - Green strategy. SEO. On-line store. Alternative this and alternative that. They are looking for solutions to problems they do not have and refuse to deal with the real problems that they do have, like crap goods, poor service, poor cost control, huge debt burdens and everything else in-between.
     
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    They are looking for solutions to problems they do not have and refuse to deal with the real problems that they do have, like crap goods, poor service, poor cost control, huge debt burdens and everything else in-between.
    What has this to do with the Op's question...? :|

    SEO is just a form of marketing. These things apply whether the business advertises through newspapers, radio TV, barrage balloons, whatever...

    The OP has possibly had poor service from someone making an offer to provide a service. No different to the piss poor service I've had from many banks, solicitors, corner stores, etc, over the years... This has nothing whatsoever to do with SEO.
     
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    webgeek

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    May 19, 2009
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    I think over a month is a bit strong for what is essentially a couple of hours work for an experienced operator.

    I've seen SEO audits done in 20 seconds using online tools.

    I've seen SEO audits that take a team of 4 nearly a week to complete.

    Assuming they had no workload and started on your project immediately could be a faulty assumption.

    Assuming they're doing just 2 hours work could be a faulty assumption.

    Assuming that flaming them on the forum is going to get them to immediately produce the holy grail of SEO audits is borderline absurd.

    You can tar all SEO people with the same brush, slagging all SEO people as if they don't read what's on the forums. But for your own sake a word of friendly advice would be, "Don't".

    You never hear of window salesmen throwing rocks at the neighbours sash windows, but negative SEO headlines hit the press almost daily and scare the daylights out of me, but maybe I'm just overly cautious. I try not to moan about the chef's cooking until after I've left the restaurant (because we all know what happens when we send food back to the kitchen, right?).

    Don't take what I'm saying as threatening, because I value my integrity above keeping the score "even" (or making a profit), but for goodness sake, some of those double-glazing SEO people make Hells Angels seem like trick or treaters.
     
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    ronnie7272

    Free Member
    Aug 28, 2010
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    I've been quoted by a member of the forum to "review of what changes are required to improve ranking for your website." This was paid for on the 5/9. This is a respected member of the forum with over 5200 posts and thanked over 1150 times so I though he would be OK.

    Emails are acknowledged as received but not replied to whilst phones are not answered and messages not replied to. I'm beginning to think I've been snied.:mad:

    If you require an audit on the website hyperlinked in your auto signature I can give you a free audit which took less than 1 minute to assess.

    Onsite SEO problems
    ===============

    Your website is not search engine friendly.

    Offsite SEO problems
    ================

    You have lots of poor quality backlinks.

    Solution
    ======

    Start again using a fresh domain. Find a web design agency who understands SEO.

    Have a bespoke ecommerce website developed for you or if you insist on using off the shelf scripts then use a web design agency who can amend the script to be search engine friendly. Find an SEO consultant who doesn't develop poor quality backlinks like you are doing now with your forum links.

    SEO audits don't take long as websites which don't rank have the same problems: crap websites and/or crap backlinks. The solution: Good websites and/or good backlinks. SEO is as simple as that. You don't need to know the details of how to create a good website and how to develop good backlinks, all you need to do is spend time chatting to different suppliers and apply due diligence to decide which suppliers to go with.
     
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    I've seen SEO audits done in 20 seconds using online tools.
    I've seen SEO audits that take a team of 4 nearly a week to complete.
    Assuming they had no workload and started on your project immediately could be a faulty assumption.
    Assuming they're doing just 2 hours work could be a faulty assumption.
    The amount paid equated to about 45 hours at minimum wage - I don't think any IT operates at that so he is certainly not going to put a team of 4 onto it for a week, knowing the prices quoted by IT guys it amounts to about 2-3 hours.
    Assuming that flaming them on the forum is going to get them to immediately produce the holy grail of SEO audits is borderline absurd.
    You can tar all SEO people with the same brush, slagging all SEO people as if they don't read what's on the forums. But for your own sake a word of friendly advice would be, "Don't".
    Perhaps the SEO people as a whole should appreciate the reputation that they are creating for themselves and I can assure you I will not submit to censorship and WILL say exactly what I think.
    The time taken is not critical but what concerns is the deathly silence. He reads my emails ( I get a receipt acknowledgement), does not answer his landline, ignores messages left on his mobile and you have the gall to tell me not to worry. I notice today that his profile has been deleted from the Members List on this forum - do you still think there is no need for me to think I've been shafted?
     
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    TODonnell

    Free Member
    Sep 23, 2011
    1,405
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    London (UK)
    Absolutely!!!

    I run a business and we have four competitors in our country.

    ....

    Google employs people and people have eyeballs and if they think your site is worthy of pushing up the list, that is exactly what will happen.

    The first suggests why you are doing well in Google. The second is not correct. A machine decides if you are worthy or not. And a machine can be fooled. Google staff may intervene, but mostly not.

    SEO is voodoo, I agree. But some practitioners must be good at it. It's just that the most successful are effectively out of the public eye (and price range), I think.
     
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    Rich Best

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    Sep 16, 2010
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    Cardiff
    SEO is voodoo

    There is nothing voodoo about SEO. There have been times in the past when you could buy a bunch of crap links and you would rank, even if your site was not really worthy of ranking. But was that really SEO, or a short term fix? It was never going to remain like that was it?

    Now it is all a lot less voodoo than ever before.

    - is your website technically sound and multi-device compatible?
    - is your content the BEST of breed?
    - are you influential as an online Brand?

    Focus on these things, and you are helping to build your online presence.

    We believe SEO is effectively dead, but that is just because SEO became a way of 'manipulating' search engines, not building a great online business and Brand.

    And by the way, you can be a great Brand even if you are a local plumber. You just have to do a lot less to be 'the best' in your niche, the smaller the market you operate in. You still have to work at being 'the best' though! It doesn't just happen, and no-one can do it all for you particularly on a shoe-string budget!!
     
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    webgeek

    Free Member
    May 19, 2009
    4,091
    1,464
    Glasgow, Scotland, UK
    Perhaps the SEO people as a whole should appreciate the reputation that they are creating for themselves and

    I can assure you I will not submit to censorship and WILL say exactly what I think.

    you have the gall to tell me not to worry.

    3 very good points:

    a. There is no such thing as seo people as a whole. I have no relationship, unless we go back dozens of generations, with any of these 'SEO people'. Perhaps my relatives a few hundred years ago did defile some women-folk in England-shire and now their progeny have become minions of, or practitioners of, some dark SEO arts, but that's unlikely the case. Instead, what appears to be happening, is the applying tar to the masses based upon the brush of the few - aka logical fallacy known as hasty generalisation.

    b. I'm a big believer in free speech. I have no interest in stopping someone, unless they're yelling, "Fire!" in a busy auditorium (where there isn't fire), or similar. Just thought I'd impart some friendly advice to prevent you from suffering further cranial rectal insertion disorder, and requiring help in removing it, or someone's backlink boot.

    I think Mark Twain once said:
    ☼ It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open ones mouth and remove all doubt ☼

    Not that it applies in this situation, but for some reason it just lit up some neurons - must be the silence thing, I dunno.

    c. I'm sorry if I told you not to worry. °°°I don't think I said that°°° But if I did, then I'd like to retract that statement.

    To the extent that you continue to say exactly what you think, I'd like to further retract that, and accept that worrying may indeed have become the most prudent course of action¡¡¡


    If someone can do the work of 4 people x 5 days x 8 hours per day and fit it into just 2 or 3 hours, then I'm okay with paying them £100 per hour ;) Then again if it's never delivered then the 4, 5, 8, 2 and 3 in the equation above become a divide by zero error. Have a beverage and see that there is no spoon.
     
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    I think that this whole thread has gone off on a bit of a tangent - not sure why?

    At the end of the day, the OP paid for a service, it hasn't been delivered, he's had no communication from the person that he's contracted to carry out the work, it's been six weeks since he commissioned the work, and he's a bit peed off - Rightly so!

    It's just bad business, full stop.
     
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    There is nothing voodoo about SEO. There have been times in the past when you could buy a bunch of crap links and you would rank, even if your site was not really worthy of ranking. But was that really SEO, or a short term fix? It was never going to remain like that was it?

    Now it is all a lot less voodoo than ever before.

    - is your website technically sound and multi-device compatible?
    - is your content the BEST of breed?
    - are you influential as an online Brand?

    Give or take a few minor glitches my site had been on page one of Google for ten years and fulfilled the three points that you have made above.

    During the summer purge the site dropped to the middle of page two where it has since stayed. In the last few months I have completely redesigned the 13 year old site to make it more modern and dropped 30 or so of the 100 plus pages as I thought that they were too similar to some of the others.

    The major gain on page one of Google are three websites all owned by the same people and all effectively the same with each site having many thousands of pages, 95% of which are just filler crap.

    Other competitors who have gained tremendously since the purge are the big banks and major factoring companies who also have huge sites so it seems that if I wish to regain a place on the all important page one it isn't the best content that I need to come up with but the largest volume
     
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    At the end of the day, the OP paid for a service, it hasn't been delivered, he's had no communication from the person that he's contracted to carry out the work, it's been six weeks since he commissioned the work, and he's a bit peed off - Rightly so!
    I don't disagree... However blaming a whole industry for one individual experience is childish. He has options to deal with it, without an irrational rant on a forum.
     
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    There is nothing voodoo about SEO. There have been times in the past when you could buy a bunch of crap links and you would rank, even if your site was not really worthy of ranking. But was that really SEO, or a short term fix? It was never going to remain like that was it?

    Now it is all a lot less voodoo than ever before.

    - is your website technically sound and multi-device compatible?
    - is your content the BEST of breed?
    - are you influential as an online Brand?

    Focus on these things, and you are helping to build your online presence.

    We believe SEO is effectively dead, but that is just because SEO became a way of 'manipulating' search engines, not building a great online business and Brand.

    And by the way, you can be a great Brand even if you are a local plumber. You just have to do a lot less to be 'the best' in your niche, the smaller the market you operate in. You still have to work at being 'the best' though! It doesn't just happen, and no-one can do it all for you particularly on a shoe-string budget!!

    That is it in a nutshell. Just common sense! Buying some template and sticking a few stock pictures and words on it and then going to some self-styled SEO 'guru' expecting him/her to bump up your ratings by magic is going to end in tears and disappointment.

    Your Google ranking is a result of the structure of your website

    AND

    The structure of your company.
     
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    I don't disagree... However blaming a whole industry for one individual experience is childish.

    Not sure if I would go so far as to call it childish, but I agree that there are good and bad in every industry.

    He has options to deal with it, without an irrational rant on a forum.

    TBH it sounds to me like short of taking the guy to court he has exhausted all his options, and out of frustration came on here (where whoever it is markets their services) to try to get some answers.

    Was it the right thing to do, or the best way to go about it? - Not really for me to say.

    That is it in a nutshell. Just common sense! Buying some template and sticking a few stock pictures and words on it and then going to some self-styled SEO 'guru' expecting him/her to bump up your ratings by magic is going to end in tears and disappointment.

    Your Google ranking is a result of the structure of your website

    AND

    The structure of your company.

    Really? Since when has how pretty your website, what the images look like, or how your company's structured been part of Google's ranking algo?

    I'm not a SEO 'Guru' nor do I claim to be, but in reality there's no magic about it what so ever.

    Google is just a robot, plain and simple. 99% of the time all you have to do is give it what it wants (Which is mostly not what Matt Cutts, and the MOZ crowd would have you believe that it wants), and you will be rewarded with better rankings.
     
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    HI everyone,
    thank you for those who know me well enough to know that this is not in my usual habit. As some one suggested i had a personal issue that has had my full attention. The client who has made a valid and truthful account of the situation but also failed to mention when i quoted and invoiced for the work he took four weeks to respond at which i away for a month and had other (current) clients who had my attention first.
    I can apologise for the delay and complete his work wednesday.
     
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    Buying some template and sticking a few stock pictures and words on it and then going to some self-styled SEO 'guru' expecting him/her to bump up your ratings by magic is going to end in tears and disappointment.

    When you claim that "buying some template and sticking a few stock pictures and words on it" won't work are you including Wordpress themes?
     
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