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Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

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Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#51

Post by jasonsync »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #43

This is exactly why I got out of SEO services. I always did quality, white hat, and ethical work and had a lot of great customers for a long time, and they started getting eaten up by these idiots. Basically the story would be: 1. I perform work for customer, they're satisfied. They would show improvement and start getting more traffic. 2. Some scam company company calls them and appeals to their sense of greed. 3. T…

No matter how good the SEO ... someone will always tell your client it's horrible. And "prove it" with an SEO report card. And then no matter how much good you did, your client will always have that thought in the back of their mind that maybe it could be better.

Little do they realize it could be a lot worse.

Here's some of the crazy I see far too often:

- SEO guys that run paid traffic through their client's affiliate programs, to generate commission on top of the regular fees they charge.

- SEO guys that offer a short-term contract initially to reel clients in, use the initial fees to actually purchase products from said client's website, and then use perceived increase in performance and revenue to get a long-term contract paid up front, and then disappear.

- SEO guys that charge for plagiarized blog content.

- SEO guys that convince clients to pay thousands of dollars to add "meta keywords" tags.

- SEO guys that rewrite click farm traffic to make it look organic.

- SEO guys that install "backdoors" on their client's hosting accounts to continue monetizing the website via backlinks long after they've been "fired".

- SEO guys that hold businesses hostage with duplicate websites (similar to this story).

- SEO guys with english-as-a-second-language, that charge for "Content Marketing"

- SEO guys that charge their clients thousands of dollars to setup and maintain Facebook, Twitter, a Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, then do nothing on them for years and hold their clients hostage for additional fees when said clients realize they're not getting their money's worth and want account access.

- SEO guys that register the domain name and hosting on the "clients behalf"

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#52

Post by api »

wesleytodd wrote: post #11

Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures. My experience with SEO companies has been horrible. I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of…

I've found a lot of this beyond just SEO and into the realm of almost anything that claims to help you with your business or with marketing. Seems to be a market that like you say is hard to quantify and draws a lot of questionable huckster types.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#53

Post by toolz »

sharkweek wrote: post #41
toolz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research/creating/promoting don't really fall under an SEO title. If search engine optimization is broadly defined enough to where content creation is considered SEO, then basically everyone with a website is an SEOer.

Content marketing is certainly rooted in SEO though, with the often-existing explicit intention of having a relevant piece of content rank well for informational queries. Or at least having this content designed to attract links, which are still a major part of the ranking equation. The lines are definitely blurring, so the main thing I'm arguing is that SEO should be in every marketer's tool belt, it's not some blac…

Everything on the internet is rooted in SEO, by design. Google has the intent that truly fascinating things be given the most visibility on the internet, that has nothing to do with studying up how to appear at the top of google's list and everything to do with studying how to be fascinating to people on the internet.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#55

Post by freebs »

normloman wrote: post #25
wesleytodd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@sharkweek The problem here is that SEO companies are usually not equipped to solve those problems. Their developers are usually secondary roles in the company, and might even be second-rate themselves. Also, good/real SEO usually requires content writers. Which is an ongoing process, and is probably not worth the cost to most small businesses.

If all they do is write interesting content and promote it, why do we call it SEO? Last time I checked, that matches the job description of public relations writer.

You can make 100 landing pages with interesting content on them, but if they are using words that people don't use when searching, they are less likely to be surfaced at the top of the results.

Those pages can be scattered across the site architect and have improper linking. They can have improper titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Often times writers can't grasp these things, or they are so overworked with pumping out content that they simply don't have the time for them.

SEOs can be more technical, and can also make changes across a large site or networks of sites. EG: Missing the city and state from the h1 of every vehicle landing page for hundreds or thousands of vehicles on a thousand dealership sites can have a dramatic impact.

In this sense many SEOs also have the skills to be what we now call Content Strategists. People that do research, plan, and keep the content teams moving in the right direction.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#57

Post by curiously »

An even worse form of such practices are sites that basically crawl yelp or yellowpages and then proceed to spam and call small businesses with the lure of 'claim your profile and get customers', when all it really is just emails from unqualified people submitting their contact information through the main site and randomly getting matched.

This startup company has ton of bad consumer reports, I'm glad that I ended up not working on their website. I would've had trouble sleeping had I seen what their website was actually doing, ripping off small businesses with fake leads.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#59

Post by dropit_sphere »

mod wrote: post #22
BrainInAJar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO, as an industry, is shysters. Even "good" SEO is still a service designed to break search engines. A scummy industry is going to attract scummy people, it just becomes a question of to what degree they are scummy.

I previously worked for a small design/development shop that ended up doing a ton of SEO work and eventually pivoted to selling those ongoing services as a large part of what they did. It was in no way scummy, nor intended to break search engines. Our approach to SEO was, in a nutshell: "write quality blog articles relevant to related search terms, include a CTA at the end." We posted lots and lots of articles. We st…

https://xkcd.com/810/

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#60

Post by mod »

dropit_sphere wrote: post #59
mod wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously worked for a small design/development shop that ended up doing a ton of SEO work and eventually pivoted to selling those ongoing services as a large part of what they did. It was in no way scummy, nor intended to break search engines. Our approach to SEO was, in a nutshell: "write quality blog articles relevant to related search terms, include a CTA at the end." We posted lots and lots of articles. We st…

https://xkcd.com/810/

Touche.

Paid well, at least.

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