Working With a Marketing Agency for SEO? What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

Chase Anderson

Some days, it’s hard to call myself an SEO. I’ve been in love with analysis and research into search engines since 2007.

Everone knows there’s pretty shady behaviour in the industry and it’s had to react to Google’s crackdown on spam and unethical practices. Because of this, most people in the industry have started to try to separate themselves from SEO.

Obviously, they want to avoid any association with the bad behaviour of the ‘few’. But how common is the problem in 2015? It might be worse than you think.

Despite the bad connotation associated with SEO I’ve always been determined to continue to call myself an SEO. I feel that SEO best describes the wide variety of skills needed to perform this work.

Today, I really wanted to ditch any association with “SEO”

Someone asked me to review a few domains they thought might be worth working on. They’d previously engaged a SEO company to help build these sites visibility in Google, so I knew going in that the links pointing to that website were a target for potential problems.

I jumped in and got through 3 of the 7 or 8 domains they wanted me to look at. To my surprise the first 2 didn’t exhibit any terrible linking tactics, it’s not uncommon to find blog links or some other nonsense. SEO companies will do just about anything to get more links back to their client websites so it’s common to see a lot of junk.

Then…

On the 3rd site, a page linking to the website had the following page title:

Free Hairl-ss N-ked Boy P-ctures*

*Changed slightly for propriety and to protect the innocent.

This SEO company could be innocent and may not have had any involvement in these links. But I sort of doubt it. It’s also something that someone had been paying more than $ 2,000 per month for.

Are you paying $ 2,000 per month to your SEO company to link ch*ld p*rn websites to your business?

I certainly hope not!

Review your businesses backlinks

It’s your responsibility to occasionally review backlinks to your domain. You can do this in Google Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t yet, you absolutely must verify your business with this service). Then select Search Traffic>Links to Your Site in the left navigation:

Bonus: Automatically monitor your backlinks in less than 5 minutes

Source Credit goes to Martijn Oud so check out his post on Moz.com for more information.

In 5 minutes you can set up IFTTT, MOZ & Page2RSS to notify you of new backlinks to your website.

1. Login to Moz and Do a query for your site. Then click the ‘Just Discovered’ tab. Copy the URL or modify the one below:
   http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/just-discovered?page=1&site=www.example.com&sort=crawled&filter=&source=external&target=domain&group=1
   
2. Create an account with Page2RSS to create an RSS feed for that page
   
3. Create an IFTTT Account – Use this Recipe to plug in the RSS feed and email yourself the new links:
   

   https://ifttt.com/recipes/91936-seo-ose

Done.

Have you been burned by an SEO? I’m always surprised by the stories I hear. There’s great ones out there so don’t fret. Do your homework and make sure you know what you’re getting.

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