» Beware of rogue SEO Companies

Beware of rogue SEO Companies - July 26, 2006

Please be aware that there is an SEO / Marketing company currently contacting website owners, especially Just Search client’s database and advising them that they do not currently have enough links from other websites pointing to their own. They will often advise you to type into Google ‘link:www.yourdomain.com’ this will advise what sites Google chooses to display that are pointing to yours.

The problem that arises is that this is not an accurate view of the overall number of sites linking to yours. For example link:www.justsearching.co.uk has shown over the past two years 1532, 468, 234 and currently show 162 despite are position growing ever stronger, it is also useful to carryout the same exercise in MSN, Yahoo and All the web this will then give a much more accurate view of how many sites are linking to yours.

The company in question is offering links from their network of 1000 websites, they advise that at least 400 have a Google Pagerank of 4-5; they then advise they will place an article on each website with links that point back to your site, in essence gaining you up to 1000 extra links.

One of our clients advised us about what they had been offered and showed us an example site. The example site had a Pagerank of 5, but had no links in Google and no websites in Google’s database that recognised the website. The next thing is that the pages that contained the articles were not being picked up by Google (i.e. No cache or Pagerank.)

Please be aware of the following when being offered any form of links:

Does each site have a separate IP address.
Is the page your link will be on being cached?
Does the link contain a rel=’nofollow’
Is the site a link farm or bad link neighbourhood?
Is the article the same on each site?
What timescale to the links increment over.

The following should always be asked when being offered links as many clients can often lose listings due to unorthodox linking strategies. For example if the company uses the same article link information on a thousand sites, then there is 1000 duplicate articles pointing to your site, again if they are running 1000 sites from one database when they add your article it will instantly add this to all 1000 sites, when Google notices that in a very short time you have had 1000 extra sites linking to yours it normally suspects this as a link farm or SPAM and so can downgrade your site or even ban your site from their Search engines.

The reason we have specifically noticed this is that one of our clients achieving 1st page listings has signed up with a company and after a week of work they are claiming that they have got the site to its position. Despite the fact that our coding is still there and the back links pointing picked up by Google are from sites that we created the link from.

It is usefull to know that some links from other sites can take several months to register within the search engines and to see an effect.

Neil Walker
Technical Director