Observations on the credit crunch

Hi Guys,

Haven't posted for a long while but since the credit crunch we've noticed an increase in the desperate tricks some SEOs are going to and wondered if you guys were experiencing the same.

Stuff we're seeing:

1. We've had 3 new clients come to us in the past 5-6 weeks complaining of their sites dropping from the rankings and their current SEO telling them they'll need to pay more to get reindexed. Each time its been a wordpress blog and we discovered the SEO had switched on "privacy" in the WP backend which adds a "noindex,nofollow" tag.

We even had it done to one of our clients! This client we optimised was ranking well and converting. They took over the site and did it inhouse and did so for a few months. So the client gets an email from their web designer (who also does SEO) to tell them that their site has dropped off the rankings but he can get it back again for a fee. The client forwarded it to us, we checked it out and it turns out the web designer had turned on privacy in wordpress!

2. SEOs now spamming our local search like crazy. We now have 6 companies in the top 10 and not one of them has an office in our area.
3. Two SEOs colluding with each other to bomb another seo out of the index. From what I could gather it was due to a post made in one of their blogs.They got together and associate/anchored the 3rd company's name all over the place then boasted about it on their blogs. Why go to all that bother?
4. SEOs ripping clients off by charging retainers for doing no work at all. This is the top complaint we hear from new clients. SEOs are using the website's historical rank to convince the client they have been maintained as a result of their ongoing SEO expertise and if they leave them their site will drop off. Every single time we've came accross this the site ranks but doesn't convert - ie huge bouncebacks (60-80% stuff), low site visit avgs etc etc.
5. SEOs and PPCs refusing to give clients access to their analytics if they decide to move their services elsewhere. Seems very common amongst PPC companies where they put multiple websites on a single parent account then ring fence it from the client. We've had several new clients tell us that they've been held to ransom over this. The data belongs to the client after all - not the SEO.
6. Inundated by offshore/onshore SEOs looking to join forces with us to do our client work.

I know most of this stuff has been around for years but we've never seen anything like it the past few months.

Haven't run across the Wordpress issue but have definitely seen people saying it will take more money to improve rankings. However...those scammers have been around a while and keep cropping up with every new wave of "I'm an SEO."

Get hit up by overseas companies all the time but what they offer is primarily bottom feeding crap which doesn't make them much different from the first set.

Google local....have one local company using four different URLs so they have four of the top ten local rankings for Internet marketing. Tried to find a way to tell Google but had no luck.

As far as budgets...my portfolio is actually growing not shrinking. Since I can deliver real results and explain how I'm doing it I'm not finding any resistance from potential clients. Those who resist can go work with the first type and come back in a year.

1. Shocked us to the core and we couldn't believe any company could stoop so low.

2. Same here - have "alerted" them but no notice taken.

3. we're singing from the same hymn sheet. We have a great reputation. Been getting our clients real results for (10) years and all most business coming from referrals. Long may it continue

UP here in the Toronto area in Canada, our yellow pages are published by BELL each Dec for the upcoming year. So each Sept or so, many of our own SEO clients get innudated with spam emails touting the offshore (mostly far east actually tho some from India) seo companies ability to get LOCAL listings up high on google. I would think that they'd then run the cheapest yellow page advert to gain the local listing and the fees I'd think...but never ever lost a client to these spammers....

We spend a bit of time explaining to our clients that such listings here are a result of the yellow page ads, and that anyone who attaches SEO fees to that process would be lying. Guess it's not as big a deal as what stuartyboy posted, but it never fails...Sept means spam SEO emails around here....

:-)

Jim