Member-only story
Before hiring me, my company has been working with an SEO agency for the last year. I assumed they weren’t doing very well considering that my company was looking to replace them.
Sure enough, the company was not getting a lot of traffic. I wondered why this was, and so I decided to do a little investigating. That was when I realized that the SEO agency was doing some shady backlink business. It’s one thing to try your best and not get any results, but another thing entirely if you’re deliberately doing a bad job and hoping to not get caught.
At the face of it, they seem to be doing their job. They have a spreadsheet and everything plus all the positive-sounding monthly reports. A deeper dive into the spreadsheet though would tell a different story — especially when I looked into the type of backlinks they were getting.
Red Flag 1: Spammy, Unrelated Websites
Everything I have read about what Google wants says that they want relevant backlinks. Also, to stay away from those spammy looking websites that have everything as a topic. Guess what, this was the opposite of what the SEO agency was doing.
Our company sold solar panels, and so relevant websites would include those that deal with renewable energy and technology or…
