by Alan Rabinowitz
This is a topic I will discuss choosing the right SEO Company. We took on a client in the Legal industry that hired a “Specialty” Legal Search Engine Optimization Firm. The company only worked for sites in this specific industry. Apparently, this company had owned its clients’ SEO and used techniques that banned other SEO companies clients in the past. Like all clients linking to each other and all links to clients came from the SEO firms own properties.
While the firm seemed was a professional company in helping the former client move its properties and they even gave the client a FULL refund – you do not see that at all in the SEO industry – kudos to them! They even had the client ranking, but for low search count terms and noncompetitive terms.
My gripe is not with the Legal SEO Company, it is with the SEO methodologies. That once the client left the SEO firm, he was left with nothing but content. All links to his PR 5 site, which were on blogs and even a well-respected .edu blog, were removed. So technically the client, once he leaves the firm, no longer has any SEO. It’s like diabolical sabotage. The clients leave and you try and hurt their business in possible hopes they may come back.
We spent a long time explaining to our new client that we are in a race as all these links being removed will hurt the clients rankings, so we need to supplement them ASAP as there is a high risk that once the 150+ links from the companies subdomains and the companies clients are removed, our new clients rankings may drop, and it may make us look bad.
So far we have actually put our client into top 10 rankings for more searched terms than he was ever ranking for. We also got him a new case since using our services.
We still felt that there may be some potential shifts in rankings once the links are spidered by Google and are seen as removed.
So all of you shopping for an SEO firm should look and see if they are interlinking their clients and putting their clients on their own properties. If you’re paying to only rent link space on an SEO firms properties then you should be fully aware of this and the potential it will have to ban your site should Google become aware of the methodology.
Within two weeks all links from this firm’s properties have been removed. So we now have full control. Also, some properties were lost on the move as the redirection was destroyed.
“We took on a client in the Legal industry that hired a “Specialty” Legal Search Engine Optimization Firm. The company only worked for sites in this specific industry.”
Wouldn’t that create a conflict of interest with most of their clients? I mean, if they’re all trying to hit relatively the same target market and keywords. In my experience, my largest clients have always requested exclusivity, so we weren’t working for two firms that were trying to reach top page placement for the same keywords.