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SEO Blackmail — When the Web Designer Secretly Murders Your Website

Posted on 27. Jun, 2009 by admin in SEO

Here’s the lat­est in the not-so-pleasant “art” of web design com­pa­nies offer­ing “SEO” ser­vices. Pic­ture your­self, a mid sized com­pany with 130 or so employ­ees, large enough to oper­ate a prof­itable busi­ness but not big enough to have your own web devel­oper on staff. So, as web stan­dards change and browser res­o­lu­tions expand, you’re forced to gather quotes from mul­ti­ple local and long dis­tance web devel­op­ment companies.

The web design com­pany you just so hap­pen to stum­ble across that suits both your fancy and your min­i­mal bud­get hap­pens to offer an add on ser­vice called the “SEO Upgrade.” Now, just to keep the water clear, I’ll be upfront and acknowl­edge that we at Sozo Firm do offer SEO Upgrade sorts of pack­ages directly to web design com­pa­nies & ad agen­cies to pass along to their cus­tomers. We’ve been doing this for quite some time, and we love doing it. How­ever, read on.

You hap­pen to opt for the web design only pack­age, and so your rep at the large web devel­op­ment com­pany gives you a phone call. “I’d strongly rec­om­mend you go with the SEO Upgrade, too. With the way Google and Yahoo and other search engines are these days, unless you’ve done SEO [sic] to your site, your site just won’t be found. All the money you’re pour­ing into web design will be a big waste.”

You hon­estly think noth­ing of the phone call, assum­ing they are just push­ing yet another way to steal another fast buck from unknowl­edgable you. Who cares about SEO? Your site has done just well over the past 7 years pulling in new clients and traf­fic each week.

It’s not until your rep’s super­vi­sor calls with the sim­i­lar story that your eye­brows raise a lit­tle. You kindly chew her out explain­ing your lim­ited bud­get. This time, though, the warn­ing almost is tainted with black­mail sar­casm: “Then we won’t be able to guar­an­tee that your site will be found online. It will look good, but you’ll prob­a­bly not get traffic.”

When you respond, “My site’s always done well in the past,” she, in turn, coyly says, “Well, if you change your mind, we’ll be here to help.” She pauses slightly, “In fact, I’ll extend the spe­cial price for the SEO Upgrade to 30 days after your site’s launch. How­ever, after the 30 days, the price will be back to the reg­u­lar price. Right now, you’re look­ing at a 40% savings.”

You con­ve­niently brush every­thing aside and, a cou­ple months later, your new web­site is live. It looks great, your clients love the new feel, and you saved your­self a bun­dle of extra cash. Over time, how­ever, the num­ber of leads begins to trickle, and you espe­cially feel the hit dur­ing the 2008 – 2009 reces­sion. You’re not sure what’s hap­pen­ing — is it just the econ­omy or is there some­thing more at stake?

And that’s when we arrive on the scene. You con­tact a local ad agency/marketing firm, ask­ing them if they offer any sort of search engine opti­miza­tion ser­vices. They in turn, part­ner­ing with us, ask us to do a “look ‘n’ see” and pro­vide them with a rough ini­tial analy­sis with rates within the bud­get you set.

And that’s when we stum­bled onto the gold mine (or, per­haps, the quick­sand?). You see, the orig­i­nal web design com­pany you hired wasn’t com­pletely up front about every­thing. The black­mail tone of voice that your instinct felt really was there. When they said that your site “prob­a­bly won’t get much traf­fic” they were actu­ally being com­pletely truth­ful. Because when a client fails to accept the “SEO Upgrade” they offer, they coun­ter­slap by pulling your new web­site in the mud, expect­ing, of course, that you’d crawl back to them cry­ing out for help.

Yes, this hor­ror story can hap­pen to you — to any­one, in fact. You’ve got to keep your eyes open. If you ever sense some­one push­ing this kind of ser­vice on you and you turn it down — par­tic­u­larly if they have a direct hand in con­struct­ing a new web­site for you — be sure to get a sec­ond opin­ion about their work. While the site may look and feel won­der­ful, in this world any­thing could be hap­pen­ing underneath.

In the par­tic­u­lar hor­ror story men­tioned above, the web devel­oper added a sin­gle line of cod­ing which became a mon­ster attack­ing the new web­site every day — a sim­ple line in the html cod­ing block­ing the site to search engine robots. In other words, when the Google­bot dropped by to browse through the site, it would be faced with an explicit com­mand to “go away.” And go away it did. Google dropped vir­tu­ally the entire site from the Google search engine list­ings, assum­ing the site and its pages were no longer wel­come. As a result, traf­fic slowed to a min­i­mum — and this for a decent sized com­pany pro­vid­ing a prod­uct all through­out the United States.

SEO Black­mail Through Block­ing Robots from Crawl­ing Your Site

Don’t let a web devel­oper play Russ­ian Roulette with your web­site. Always get a sec­ond opin­ion. Always.

At Sozo Firm, we offer afford­able sec­ond opin­ion eval­u­a­tion ser­vices for pro­vid­ing feed­back on your Google Adwords cam­paign setup; your site’s web design, nav­i­ga­tion & under­ly­ing cod­ing; your SEO & back­link­ing cam­paigns; and more. Don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact us by email or phone any­time. Andrew Jensen, our senior con­sul­tant, will gladly give you the insight you need.

Related Posts:

• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Methods
• Be Care­ful in Choos­ing SEO Web Hosting
• SEO Tips for Attrac­tive Search Engine Friendly Web Design
• Under­stand­ing Search Engine Optimization
• Out­source Seo To Grow Business

Tags: highly-misunderstood, host-organization, large-enough, mid-sized, search-engine, the-process, web-design, website-design