Audit your web designer
Our Utah internet marketing company saw something interesting last week when we signed up a new client - they had a PageRank but were not included in Google’s index - nowhere. Not even a site:<domain>.com would bring up their site.
I haven’t dealt with this particular problem in the past - I have dealt with banned sites but they have never actually shown an external PR. After adding their site to Webmaster Central I saw this message:
No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines.
Upon closer inspection I saw that they had hidden text on their page. What really worried me was what the hidden text was - links to competitors!
At this point I put everything together - their web designer had a link at the bottom of each page to contact the webmaster. The emails went to only him and he was renting links to competitors. The links were hidden in the CSS file so the client had no idea they were linking to competitors. Yahoo and MSN (the two engines that didn’t bother kicking them out) were showing these links.
I learned two good lessons from this:
1) Whenever you have a contact us link make sure you are also receiving those emails - not just your web designer or SEO.
2) Hire another company to audit your SEO or web designer. Most will probably do this for pretty cheap. Make it clear that you have no intentions to switch (so they don’t do the used car salesman thing), but just to check up on what their current SEO is doing. If you pay a few hundred bucks they will probably give you a really honest opinion that could potentially save you thousands.
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Again, it’s proven that the barrier to entry is far too low for this market. This is, of course, grounds for a suit.
Insane.
Comment by Scott Clark — March 19, 2007 @ 7:43 pm
Amen, Scott - my hope is that over time as the industry becomes more established people will realize that they need quality SEO more than the cheap options out there - in the end it is usually more expensive to go the “cheap” route.
Comment by Preston — March 20, 2007 @ 6:44 pm