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An SEO scam: $62k later

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Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#41

Post by Cthulhu_ »

beefield wrote: post #22
cj wrote: post #3

1) SEO works best when you create real content targeted at real users 2) SEO works best when its not your end goal 3) Google knows this and is smarter than your SEO agency. Ditch the agency and simply create legitimate content your users find valuable and google will rank it. It might take more than 12 months for everything to rank and pay off. But that's life. Google Ads exists for people looking for immediate resul…

That is a nice theory many (especially google) would like me to believe, but if that is the case, why majority of my google first page results can be classified as SEO spam?

Because Google earns more money off of those results than legitimate pages. That's what I think anyway. Some years ago they said they were going to crack down on SEO spam, content farms, even website popups like newsletter subscriptions, asking people to report them through a browser plugin.

But since then... nothing, and the content farms are prominent again. Google doesn't care because the competition isn't significantly better, and they don't actually care about the search results, they care about ad impressions which they will get regardless of how people end up on pages - or what pages for that matter.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#42

Post by Cthulhu_ »

input_sh wrote: post #36

> We hope that this circus will eventually come to an end, and search engines will have to either improve their algorithms or people will lean more on solutions like ChatGPT, lessening their reliance on these engines. Do they really think ChatGPT is gonna do any better at generating leads? The same ChatGPT that provides fuck all links to the outside web? It's like they recognise one scam and jump head first straight…

I mean one thing I can see ChatGPT work for is customer communication, both sales and support; it's one of those things that is difficult to scale, especially on online chat windows where people quickly lose interest. For small companies that don't have the people or the money to hire an external web support company it can be a solution.

But then, it'll probably be expensive anyway; they would have to train chatgpt on their own data, do a lot of practice conversations, review conversations and make adjustments, and of course take over an automated chat if it's not working.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#43

Post by Cthulhu_ »

DonHopkins wrote: post #32
blitzar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice plot twist ... they were scammed by themselves.

They should have named names.

That's dangerous because it can be considered libel; the SEO company did their job and can show results, but even if it didn't, I'm pretty sure libel laws protect companies even if they're not doing a good job.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#44

Post by flir »

tacker2000 wrote: post #15

SEO is basically snake oil. You try some things that someone in that dark corner over there tells you to do and have no idea if the black box called Google will rank you higher or not. Results are not instantly or even actually measureable. And in the end you spend cash and have no idea if it helped or not. Basically, like someone else in this thread already said, SEO is best if you are not doing it actively, but whe…

> Basically, like someone else in this thread already said, SEO is best if you are not doing it actively, but when you are creating stuff that really benefits users, readers, etc…

If that were true. Google's results would be better.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#45

Post by sampo »

> However, when they tried writing content for us, it was dull, repetitive, error-ridden, and superficial.

This might work for companies that are not able, on their own, to add any text content to their website? I would guess, even badly written content containing the correct keywords, is better than a website with no text paragraphs at all.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#46

Post by abatilo »

robertlagrant wrote: post #34
abatilo wrote: post #25

After about 2 years, I somehow started getting Google traffic to one of my websites. It wasn't much, maybe 1k to 2k views a month. I didn't touch the website at all in those 2 years and when I started getting traffic from Google, I decided that maybe I should setup the Google search console SEO best practices. I went through their entire checklist and my traffic went to flat 0. I scored a perfect 100 across every cat…

The guidance was probably written by an internal Google equivalent of the agency in the article, not a Google engineer who knows how everything works.

You're probably right but my naive hope was that things like PageSpeed insights that measure things like accessibility and page speed would be a part of search rankings.

I went from an average page rank position of 4 for relevant keywords to nothing and now there's 0 growth for views of my site. I'd have been better off just not touching it at all. Sad.

Prior to making changes, I had consistent 30% MoM growth for 4 months in a row and all from Google results.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#47

Post by stef25 »

My experience with SEO is that it's very easy to rank for sufficiently niche sites with little competition. Even a 1 page site with keywords in the domain and the right H1 and H2 and maybe a paragraph of text.

If you're in a competitive field like a web dev agency imho the only way to rank is is write relevant articles for people looking for an agency to throw thousands of euros at (how much does a site or app cost, how long does it take, what to look out for, what are maintenance costs etc)

If you succeed at educating visitors maybe a few will think that hey these guys seem to know what they're talking about maybe I want to become their client.

It's as "easy" as that. Word of mouth would honestly be a lot better though.

Like they said themselves, "how to create a React slideshow" is irrelevant for a business looking for an agency.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#48

Post by mercurialsolo »

I am 100% in agreement here. A lot of the shady practices thrown around by agency operators in the name of getting you leads, and showing you busy work. Social, SEO, PR, all are the same.

Everyone promises a bunch of future results and charges on basis of work done not on outcome.

At the end of the day as an operator and a founder you first need to figure out what works for you and use an agency only for scaling what you know works. Bring the agency for operating and not for strategy at all.

Even for scaling you need to have the playbook dry and cut. If you get the agency to sell you snake oil by promising leads by doing work, or getting you from 0-1 with a channel it never ever works out.

A whole lot of agencies go about doing a bunch of copy-paste work and well designed reports all to keep you chasing mirages that never manifest.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#49

Post by iamapot »

abatilo wrote: post #25

After about 2 years, I somehow started getting Google traffic to one of my websites. It wasn't much, maybe 1k to 2k views a month. I didn't touch the website at all in those 2 years and when I started getting traffic from Google, I decided that maybe I should setup the Google search console SEO best practices. I went through their entire checklist and my traffic went to flat 0. I scored a perfect 100 across every cat…

The first mistake was trusting google on anything

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#50

Post by denton-scratch »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43
DonHopkins wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have named names.

That's dangerous because it can be considered libel; the SEO company did their job and can show results, but even if it didn't, I'm pretty sure libel laws protect companies even if they're not doing a good job.

Truth is always a defence to allegations of defamation.
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