An SEO scam: $62k later • Hacker News Board

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#61

Post by freitasm » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

A personal anecdote. I run a (locally) popular online forum and many years ago I was approached by a company that bought a single-word domain name directly related to their core business. Our agreement was that I would use their API to load job listings in a dedicated sub-forum - our site is known around here for supporting the tech community when possible, so I didn't even charge for that.

So far, so good. One day, someone from this person's company registered on our site and posted a couple of spam messages full of keywords and links to this company's domain. Checking the user account, it did have that company's domain email (we validate registration emails), but the IP address was from a country very far away from here. The post was removed, and the account was banned per our rules.

I contacted the General Manager (GM) for that company and sure enough, there was an explanation: they had engaged a local SEO agency, and this agency outsourced some of the SEO work. Unknown to the GM the sub-contractor's link-building approach was "go around spamming comments and forums".

I told the GM that this was an unacceptable practice and that he was wasting money with that agency. Even more so because his domain name was so clear and related to their business that I considered that a waste of money.

His company didn't last long. The SEO agency is still around.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#62

Post by abatilo » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:21 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #58

abatilo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

That sounds... deeply frustrating. I've not done this stuff before, so the only thing I can suggest is: could you back out the changes and see if that makes a difference?

It's very possible and I considered it. But the UI/UX changes I made improved accessibility, and I decided that I'd rather keep those changes as I think they make for a better website anyways.

Maybe ironically, my analytics provider (not Google) has recently started showing the tiniest upwards momentum in Bing being a top referrer. Since all my traffic grew steadily after 2 years of no changes, I'm now curious to see what happens if I continue to just let it sit there.

Re: An SEO scam: $62k later

#63

Post by XCSme » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #35

folbec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted, But I Have Never Been Able To Decide Which Half" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

> "One-Half the Money I Spend for Advertising Is Wasted..." I once worked with a small company where essentially 100% of their PPC spend was wasted. Not half wasted, not mostly wasted, but completely wasted. The marketing manager was determined to spend her budget though, for fear of losing it, so month after month she tinkered with keywords, rewrote ad copy, and the ads ran and ran, sometimes people clicked, views w…

> why they were running PPC ads on their name was somewhat of a mystery

Because that's how Google works. If you don't, your competitor might do, and then your organic first place won't actually show first.