Is there a law against negative seo?

[kate-brownhill]

Just to clarify some erroneous points made on this thread. The partial penalty message does indeed affect the site "partially". Unfortunately, its the part that you have been targeting and therefore likely to be the part that brings in any money to the site owners. To say that it does not affect ranking and its just a warning and can be ignored is just plain wrong. Also, you will find that's its IMPOSSIBLE to rank the site for those terms from that point onwards until the penalty is removed.

Anyone deciding to live with such a message and not have it removed due to their mistaken understanding of its negative effect is making a huge mistake.

 

[Murray]

Just to clarify some erroneous points made on this thread. The partial penalty message does indeed affect the site "partially". Unfortunately, its the part that you have been targeting and therefore likely to be the part that brings in any money to the site owners. To say that it does not affect ranking and its just a warning and can be ignored is just plain wrong. Also, you will find that's its IMPOSSIBLE to rank the site for those terms from that point onwards until the penalty is removed.

Anyone deciding to live with such a message and not have it removed due to their mistaken understanding of its negative effect is making a huge mistake.

Of course you should try and clean it up, as I said, that would be prudent.

But luckily cleaning it up was pretty easy, because the SEO company were in complete control of their spam links.

As someone in the SEO industry Kate, you must cringe at the idea of someone using keyword anchor text footer links on unrelated sites in 2013, how behind the times and stupid could those "SEO experts" be lol it would be laughable if they weren't ripping their customers off.

 

[kate-brownhill]

With regards to SEO companies, we actually find the worst situations arise from ‘friends’ (who later turn out to be actual owners in this case) who think they are SEO experts carrying out work on their friend’s websites.

Recently we had a case where we tried to rank a low paying client site but the specific keyphrases were very difficult to budge. We started to suspect the site was under a penalty so we asked the site owner about this. He said he did not know of any penalty. We knew from experience that it was a common tactic for many SEO companies who got their clients a penalty to delete the penalty message from Web master tools and not inform the site owners of this. This was before web master tools has a specific section for Manual Action so it was easily done and quite common. In fact, at the time, the only method open to SEOs to find out exactly what was going on was to fill out a reconsideration request so we decided to do just that. Lo and behold we received a message saying the site is STILL under a penalty. i.e it has been under a penalty since before we took over. We then spoke to the friend who admitted that he received a penalty message but ignored it completely as he also did not believe it meant anything. If the friend would have been honest with us and his friend from the beginning we would have been able to clear the penalty and rank the client with a fraction of the effort. The whole thing cause us and the client so much wasted time money and effort. The problem with many people who think they know what they are talking about, is that they are letting their egos get the better of them. They don’t realise that even a small SEO company will typically monitor over 20 or 30 sites and have a much better overview and real life experience. They will also tend to have the resources and ability to run tests and experiments and therefore they find things out that someone looking after a site or two won’t know.

Interestingly enough, looking at the site rankings just now, it seems that they have dropped quite a lot further since we stopped work on the site so I am assuming that the ‘friend’ has still not bothered to remove the penalty. Seems they don’t know as much about SEO as they think they do. Everyone is quick to blame SEO companies, and yes, there are many dodgy ones out there but sometimes the clients seem to have completely unrealistic expectations for their budgets and expect top of the range Organic SEO yet they are only prepared to pay £250/month for it.

Some people should stick to singing rather than try and do SEO.

 

[DaveP]

So Kate are you saying you took on a job for a client and accepted their £250/month budget but did not provide top of the range organic SEO for them? Why take on the job in the first place then? Did you make it absolutely clear to them they would not be getting your best effort in this case?

 

[kate-brownhill]

So Kate are you saying you took on a job for a client and accepted their £250/month budget but did not provide top of the range organic SEO for them? Why take on the job in the first place then? Did you make it absolutely clear to them they would not be getting your best effort in this case?

To answer this I will have to bring some details of the company into the discussion that I am not prepared to do at this point. Suffice to say that the reason some of the actions we took was due to us not knowing the site was under a penalty and even though we regularly asked the client if he knew anything about it, they said no. We later found out that the previous SEO company was actually a partner in the company and they actively withheld that information which compromised the whole campaign. If you are going to hire an SEO company, the first rule is to be 100% honest with them with regards to previous work, even if it was you yourself that carried it out.

 

[DaveP]

To answer this I will have to bring some details of the company into the discussion that I am not prepared to do at this point. Suffice to say that the reason some of the actions we took was due to us not knowing the site was under a penalty and even though we regularly asked the client if he knew anything about it, they said no. We later found out that the previous SEO company was actually a partner in the company and they actively withheld that information which compromised the whole campaign. If you are going to hire an SEO company, the first rule is to be 100% honest with them with regards to previous work, even if it was you yourself that carried it out.

I asked if you made it absolutely clear to your client that their budget was too low for (as you put it) 'top of the range SEO'? I'm sorry to say this but it seems to me you accepted their £250 budget without actually informing your client of this. Secondly, surely you should do a review of any website before carrying out work on it, for example checking for penalties, spam links etc?

 

[kate-brownhill]

I asked if you made it absolutely clear to your client that their budget was too low for (as you put it) 'top of the range SEO'? I'm sorry to say this but it seems to me you accepted their £250 budget without actually informing your client of this. Secondly, surely you should do a review of any website before carrying out work on it, for example checking for penalties, spam links etc?

Dave, please don't put words in my mouth. We have clearly explained the scope of work the client is going to receive for the budget he wanted. And yes, we did inform them of the dodgy links they had right from the word go. We have the emails to prove it so again, please don't make assumptions. If you read my post carefully, you will see that at the time the only way to find out if a site was under a penalty was to send a reconsideration request. Its only recently that Google has included the Manual Action section.

 

[DaveP]

Kate my one and only assumption was based on this sentence in your post:

the clients seem to have completely unrealistic expectations for their budgets and expect top of the range Organic SEO yet they are only prepared to pay £250/month for it.

Apart from that I merely asked a couple of questions so that I myself can have a better understanding of the situation. My intention was to offend you or your business.

 

[kate-brownhill]

Well, I sincerely hope my answers have mitigated your sense of wrong doing in this situation.

edit - sorry forgot to add the icon.

 

[DaveP]

Well, I sincerely hope my answers have mitigated your sense of wrong doing in this situation.

edit - sorry forgot to add the icon.

My apologies if you feel any wrong doing, I felt I was merely providing criticism to be honest.

 

[kate-brownhill]

No problem Dave. Don't mention it.