Video Transcript – SEO Agencies still buying bad backlinks

Welcome back, Rankers. Recording from home again today because tomorrow in Melbourne we have a public holiday for a horse race, which is pretty cool, well, depending on your perspective anyway. No live show this week. Sorry about that, kids.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about something we discovered during the week, and that is bad SEO or what happens when SEO goes bad or what happens when your SEO goes bad. During the week, I recorded three videos last week and I put them up there. I’ll link to them in the blog post.

Essentially, there was one SEO company that is quite high profile, and by high profile, I mean that they do a lot of advertising on mainstream media, lots of advertising on radio. Got a well-known brand name in Melbourne and Adelaide. Anyway, they were…We took over a former client of their site. We went and had a look. We couldn’t work out why the no-index tag was being added to every page. We couldn’t find how that was happening. You go and remove them and it would come back.

The no-index tag means that if Google sees your robots Meta tag has no-index in it, it means that it will take that page out of the index. For this particular client it meant that their site would disappear from Google and was disappearing from Google. Subsequent to that, I did another video that I went and dug out and I had a look at a bunch of their clients. I went and got a whole list of all their clients. We found that there was a bunch of them that had the no-index tag in there like that.

Today we’ve got another one where we’ve just taken it over. They were previously with I guess arguably Australia’s largest digital agency. They’re a lot more than an agency. They’re massive. Hello to everybody watching from that organization. I know there are about 30 of you that watch the show on a regular basis. I’m not going to tell you who the organization is, but I think I need to come out and do some training, guys. Seriously.

Because whilst the one I showed last week towards the end of the week wasn’t bad SEO, it was just really spiteful and horrible, basically taking a client as a client’s on the way out and they go and hide a piece of code deep in the site that no-index’s every page. Anyway, we found that and fixed it.

This is old SEO and bad SEO which I’m about to show you now. The reason I’m showing it to you is if you were doing this stuff on your own or if you’ve employed an agency to do this stuff and you get a report like this, you’ve got to question it. Because you can get yourself into trouble from Google, which is quite odd as this agency is a Google partner.

This is a copy & paste directly from the client. He said look this is what the agency did last month. I could go through this piece by piece and rip it to pieces, just things like they changed a page title to overcome book block with a reading tutor in Adelaide from export reading tutors from Adelaide. A) It’s too long, it’s not going to appear in the SERPs. B) It’s probably keyword stuffing in their page title.

This is the thing that worries me. Sorry if it looks out of context a bit because I just had a battery failure and had to start recording again. Anyway, these backlinks, this link building, we do the disavow and removing links. I understand people think they need backlinks, and you do. We go about it a completely different way.

These are the sorts of backlinks this guy’s got. We’ve got three backlinks here. I shouldn’t say this guy. Sorry, mate. We’ve got three backlinks here. If I go and have a look at this one, what’s this one? Skypingreadingtutor.com which is…We’ll just bring that one up. We’ll get back to that one. Skypingreadingtutor.com, let’s just have a look and see what that looks like.

I’ve got this one. There’s meant to be a backlink here. I’ve checked the source code. There is no backlink here. Either there was a backlink here and it’s been removed, or they didn’t get to put a backlink here and they’ve just reported that they have put a backlink here. That’s okay, bad reporting.

Then I’m going to have a look at this one, Pragmatic Mom. Pragmatic Mom, we’ve got two backlinks. Unfortunately, they’re in the user name. It’s comment spam basically. There’s no other way to look at it. There’s a backlink in this user name up here and this user name up here straight back to an internal page of the client’s site. Something’s going terribly awry here to get one on July 27 and another on August 26. Two different user names both linking to the same page on my client’s site. The ridiculous thing is that both of those backlinks are no-follow, so there’s no link juice that you’re going to get from Google anyway.

Then, this is the final one, and this is the one that concerns me. Is it this one, parenting and train discipline? No, no, this one. This is the one. This one here, Hudsonchamberco.com. If you read the blurb about this blog, it’s about Nick. He loves boats. This is all about making a business out of giving people boat rides.

This blog I’ve done a Who Is lookup on it, you can see here it’s all protected. It’s anonymous. It’s hosted in Panama. You start looking at some of the blog posts. ‘Important Tips for Choosing a Home Inclinator.’ That’s what you want to write about when you’re looking to have a professional boat riding.

Anyway, this is the one for the client and this is the one that concerns me. It’s probably the one that we’re going to get rid of first, because it is on topic for my client’s site. If you look down here, we’ve got a link straight back to my client’s site. This is a US based site hosted in Panama with one backlink in it to an Adelaide based company. That just screams out of this blog post, ‘Paid Backlinks!’ That’s what this blog post is for. If Google sees this then possibly you won’t get an unnatural link penalty because there aren’t enough of them, but if there were enough of them, there would be a problem.

All I’m saying is when you’re working with your SEO company, have an understanding of what’s being done. If you see reports like this and you see backlinks, and you go look at where you’re getting your backlink from and you don’t like the look of that content, that’s a good reason to say hey don’t do it.

Think about backlinks as a way to get traffic to your site. Forget about Google for the moment. If you think about it in those terms, you will go and find the right sites to get backlinks from. It’s that simple.

Go and have a look at the other two videos. I did three videos last week. Go have a look at the other two. One of them talks about some more tools you might want to have a look at. That went out last Friday. Hopefully that’s helpful. You guys at the agency, call me. Talk to you later. Bye.