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Does Your SEO Company Care About Your Business…Or Theirs?

If you really want to know how much an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company cares about their clients, take a look at some of the websites that they optimize. All you need to do is to scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for links. If you see links such as those in the screen shots below, the SEO company is using the client’s website to provide themselves with a boost in rankings.

SEO_Links

Here is another example of an SEO company using the same method.

SEO_Links_2

I don’t have an issue with an SEO company having one link to their own site. The company should take credit for the SEO work they are doing (as long as it is GOOD work). What I do have an issue with is the numerous companies that use clients sites to be backlink generators for their own company. The footers should simply have one link to their own website and just use the company name as the anchor text. If the SEO discloses the fact that they will be using the client in the examples above and gives the client the option to not have the links, then I also have no issue.

The amount of links on a website that point away from a site plays a huge role in search rankings. If a website is full of links at the bottom of the page that point to other sites, the site’s SEO strength helps those sites and dilutes the strength of the numerous internal pages. An SEO company that decides to use a client’s website to help their own business and not that of their client, just does not have the client’s interest before their own.

Take a look at this post by Derek Powazek if you want to read another person’s take on the subject of SEO companies and a follow-up by Danny Sullivan.

(Please note that I adjusted the example images above to exclude any SEO company names and other information.)

Photo credit: CodiceInternet

  • http://www.webmarketingadvisor.com Dave Ashworth

    Whilst I agree that a company shouldn’t really have more than one link, I see no harm in a keyword rich / deep link – I would also say that it’s still in the interests of the SEO company to have their client site rank well and gain good page strength as it helps both parties, so would disagree that these links are about the SEO company having their own interests at heart.

  • Dan

    Thanks for the comment, Dave.

    The issues:

    -Multiple links to the SEO site
    -Neither sites in the example ranked well for any keywords
    -No back links from the SEO sites to the sites. Though one had a huge link farm on one page to some client’s sites. (Must be an added cost.)
    -The SEO taking that time to put those links in valuable spots on the client’s site and NOT thinking about page design and flow.

  • http://www.obnoxiousacorns.com Nicole Turpin

    I agree that they should not have more than one link. They do this though to show up for more than one keyword. Since optimizing an SEO site is harder since professionals are working their own site as well, they feel that they can get ahead of the game with more than one link. However, that could be counted as spam. If Matt Cutts decides he wants to change the google formula to penalize those, than many SEO sites will suffer.

    BTW, I am now following you on twitter. I’m @obnoxiousacorns.

  • http://www.obnoxiousacorns.com Nicole Turpin

    Oh, and how did you get the icons to show up? I’ve tried plugins, but I can’t do it. Any help is appreciated. :)

  • Dan

    Thanks for the comments!

    With the constantly changing algorithm, i wonder if the search engines do penalize multiple footer links in footers for certain words.

  • Dan

    The Gravatar icons? It is a setting in the WordPress options. I think all you need to do is check the box to use them.

  • http://www.obnoxiousacorns.com Nicole Turpin

    I’ve got it! Thank you!

    And I’m sure it will change soon and they’ll get penalized since that’s another way to spam.

  • http://www.MediaTwoPointOh.com Michael Hubbard

    One of our clients was paying an “SEO expert” a lot of money – and the first thing I noticed when we took over was the linking structure on the footer. They had between 3-5 link mentions on every page – and although they were all similar to your screen grabs (web site by xxx), all of the links were directing to his other clients. Obviously there’s a lot of things wrong with this, but to me – this is the ongoing “SEO ponzi” scheme – as long as there are enough people who don’t care (or don’t know), the links will keep going.

  • Dan

    I have seen those as well. They just try to turn all their client’s sites into link farms.

    The website of one of the SEO companies listed above had their OWN site doing the same thing.

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