Mr Daz

I’ve received a few emails over the years offering ‘SEO services’ for different websites. Actually, I’ve received a few emails today, the use of the word ‘few’ was a serious understatement, but never mind.

Anyway, I received one today and was shocked at, firstly, the poor grammar and, secondly, the fact that the email offers ‘copywriting’ services – at least it would, if the illiterate imbecile who put finger to keyboard to scribe this dross knew the difference between ‘copywriting’ and ‘copyright’.

Check this out:

SEO| Internet Marketing| Website Designing

Hi

We are leading SEO service provider and web Development Company. We are expert in PHP,.NET, and many open sources like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Oscommerse ,Zencart and Blog Management. We offer best of quality work to our clients at the lowest possible prices. We can quickly promote your website.

We can place your website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. We do not use “”link farms”" or “”black hat”" methods that Google and the other search engines frown upon and can use to de-list or ban your site. . Price is never a constraint with us because we take pride in handling challenging work.

We would be happy to send you best fit proposal for web development and designing and if you have a SEO requirement we will send you a proposal using the top search phrases for your area of expertise.

In order for us to respond to your request for information, please include your company’s website address (mandatory) and /or phone number.

Sincerely,
Aden Clark
clarkaden634@gmail.com
COMPLETE INTERNET MARKETING SOLUTION
SEO – Link Building – Copyright – Web Designing – PHP

He’s offering ‘copyright’ services? What, he’s offering to secure a patent on something for me, to register a trademark? What?

Can someone please offer ‘copywriting’ services to the idiots that offer ‘copyright’ services via unsolicited emails?

Also note the use of a ‘gmail’ email address. They do this so that no actual SEO company can be immediately linked with the sending of spam emails. If I were to reply to this moron (who, admittedly, probably doesn’t exist anyway) I would receive a reply from a different email address, from someone who would say something along the lines of ‘I am taking over from Aden’…

It frightens me that some people would actually fall for this. No wonder the SEO industry has a bad reputation.

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When you hire an SEO company to work on your website you need to ensure that they know what they’re doing, they’re ethical and they don’t do anything to endanger your website in Google. Sadly, many SEO companies (including some UK based ones) engage in spam linking tactics, such as spamming the comments of blogs with badly written copy in the hope of building links.

For example, the following ‘comment’ was left on one of our sites recently (today actually, on a Saturday) using an IP address based in Asia. As you can see, the comment is asking for a link to the client’s website (an ‘SEO’ company based in London) and has been written by someone who clearly has English as a second language. The line: ‘There is following our link details once you will add then confirm the same’ demonstrates the poor use of English.

Have a read of the comment we received:

Author : smith (IP: 110.172.26.20 , 110.172.26.20) E-mail : smith.adairs@gmail.com
URL : http://www.digital-spark.co.uk/
Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/110.172.26.20
Comment:
Dear webmaster,

I just visited your website. After reviewing your website, I thought you would be a great resource for exchanging link.

There is following our link details once you will add then confirm the same.

By using following details:

Title: seo company
URL: http://www.digital-spark.co.uk/
Description: SEO Consultant London – Digital Spark

Awaiting for your response

Thanks & Regards,
Link Exchange Expert

This type of spam link building doesn’t do a website any favours, and merely serves to highlight the unethical practices of the SEO company involved. The fact that these links are FOR the SEO company makes matters even worse.

You shouldn’t spam websites for links using poor quality, broken English.

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One of the things that’s always bothered me about the SEO industry is how just about anyone can claim to be an SEO specialist, and offer search engine optimisation services to unsuspecting clients regardless of their actual knowledge of the industry.

The people that do this, without any real knowledge of SEO, tend to be web designers (or sorts) who have realised that their clients now want SEO and, rather than pass them on to a credible SEO agency, claim to be able to do it themselves. They’ll often charge a flat rate for one off work too, because, let’s face it, they don’t really know what they’re doing anyway so what difference does it make how they do it?

Whether you’re a plumber in Cheshire or a national accounting firm, whether you’re going after geographical keywords or generic keywords, they charge the same… because they have little or no idea of how to rank a website anyway, why the heck not?

I was looking at one website this last week and noticed they’d had SEO done (kind of) but there were a few, shall we say, glaring errors. It was apparent that whoever had performed the SEO wasn’t an expert in their field, and had more likely cribbed off some notes from a blog or forum before attempting the work. For example, they’d even spelt the word ‘Stockport’ wrong in the client’s Title tag!

So, I looked at the website for the company responsible and found that they were in fact a rather well known design agency in Chester… a design agency also offering ‘SEO services’; well, who doesn’t these days?

A quick look through their site and I could see just how they’d have made a mistake with the client’s website; their blog didn’t even feature a Title tag… on ANY of the pages. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of SEO will tell you about the importance of a Title tag, yet this SEO company didn’t even have one, on any of the blog’s pages. The Title tag was blank…

I presume this was an oversight; perhaps someone was updating the template and forgot to put the Title tag generator back in? Whatever the reason, it wasn’t checked and the rankings of the website will be affected as a result; just like any website’s Google rankings would be affected if similar errors were made while optimising a website.

When you let someone loose on your website for SEO, make sure they know what they’re doing.

Oh, did you want to know who the SEO company in question is? Sorry; I’m not tipping them off

See, I’ve grown as a person.

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StuckOn’s new website launched this week, and with our new YouTube channel which will offer advice and tips on SEO. The first SEO advice video on the channel is all about optimising your Title Tags for search engines.

Title Tags are one of the most important on-page factors for SEO and, even though a simple tweak to a Title Tag can make all the difference to a website’s rankings, some websites even leave them off altogether. This video offers five top tips to formatting your Title Tags to increase your website’s rankings in the search engines – and it’s under a minute in length!

You can also watch the video on SEO advice here.

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Using geographical keywords in search engine optimisation is one of the most difficult to things to make natural, and something that many inexperienced SEOs fail to do quite spectacularly.

The use of geographical keywords is help your website rank for searches on specific services in conjunction with locations, so if someone is searching for ‘SEO’ and they’re located in Ellesmere Port, they would most likely search for ‘SEO Ellesmere Port’. Of course, in order to rank for a phrase such as this you need to use the phrase in your content, but ‘SEO Ellesmere Port’ is not grammatically correct – you would have to use a stop word such as ‘in’, making the phrase ‘SEO in Ellesmere Port’.

However, if you want an exact match on your SEO keywords, you’ll want to try to get the phrase into your content without the stop word – but doing that while maintaining the integrity of your content can be difficult. There are ways to do it though, as you can use punctuation instead of stop words. For example:

One of the most important marketing services is SEO. Ellesmere Port companies often look for…

You can use the Internet to look for local companies offering SEO; Ellesmere Port for example has several of these companies.

By using punctuation such as this, you are able to use geographical keywords and make them read naturally.

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It seems I was wrong and the marketing monkeys at Flakelet.com did reply – and with an explanation on how duplicate content works and that I have nothing to worry about! I can go on my merry way copying their articles and pasting them on my site, and Google won’t care a jot – at least according to Ms. Weng Lopez. Here is what she said:

Hi Darren,

Thanks for replying. For details, you can browse the database of our articles at www.flakelet.com, where you can also learn more about how we work.

For concerns about duplicate content here are two reasons:

1. Duplicate content is an issue only when present on your own site (and that kind of duplicate content could cause some serious trouble for you). But, Google won’t punish you for reprinting other peoples’ content and they routinely index duplicate content pages, without a problem. You can easily check this by Googling a random article title from an article directory, such as EzineArticles.com. More often than not, you will find that multiple copies of the same article exist in Google’s index.

Why yes, if you search for a specific article title then you will find the sites where that article has been used. Naturally – if Google didn’t show you the sites where it had been used, it wouldn’t be of much use as a search engine. However, if I searched for phrases relating to that article I would NOT find each of those pages, all being duplicates of each other.

Google won’t punish you for copying content? I happen to think that’s about as inaccurate as you can get. Good luck with that Ms. Weng Lopez.

She continued:

2. We don’t require you to republish our articles “as is.” In fact, you can change them as much (or as little) as you wish and you will own the copyright. In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description. By adding a short 1-2 sentence introduction at the beginning, you should be more than covered.

“In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description.” …erm… no. A world of no, and once again, just in case I’ve not made myself perfectly clear, no.

Btw, we will be covering the issue of duplicate content in detail in our community, which is another good reason for joining. If you are interested, just follow this link http://flakelet.com/wp-register.php and register with the following invitation code: w4507l .

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Best regards,

Ms. Weng Lopez
weng.lopez@mikino.com
www.flakelet.com

Now I have to admit, I am curious as to what they’re going to say about duplicate content – merely because I need a good laugh and don’t often get chuckles on an SEO front – since I stopped visiting the forums at SEOchat at least.

However, I think I’ll leave this be for now… although I can feel the urge to reply coming on.

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My problems with the Child Support Agency are well documented, as are a great many people’s problems I guess. Because my efforts to get them to admit their mistakes proved fruitless, even when they posted someone else’s bank details to me, I set up the anti-CSA website CSAHell.com.

This website was created to allow people who are having trouble with the Child Support Agency to voice their problems to the world and maybe get some advice on how to deal with it.

On the website you can read emails we have received from non resident parents and parents with care who have given up hope on trying to get the CSA to do their job properly. The website also features my famed YouTube videos of phone calls I have had with the CSA.

Now, how has this impacted?

Firstly, anyone looking for the ‘child support agency’ who Google’s ‘child support agency’ is able to see my legendary CSA video on the front page of Google, as you can see here.

The video has received almost 10,000 views at time of writing this, and will receive a lot more over the coming weeks and months. The ‘administrative error’ the hapless Ryan admits to on the phone is hilarious, and very damning for the CSA.

But what of people looking for ‘CSA Complaints’? Well, I have that one sewn up in spades. Not one, but TWO websites on the front page of Google, csahell.com and mrdaz.com.

There’s no escaping for the CSA. We’re here to stay and we’re only getting stronger.

If you’ve been screwed over by them, have your say at csahell.com and tell the world your story. It will be heard, by a LOT of people.

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This week I wrote about Google News and the benefits of being included in Google News, however I have noticed a great many sites that are listed that don’t deserve to be listed, either through offering poor quality content, duplicate content or content hidden behind login pages.

For example, this week I was looking for some news on business travel for a particular website and found the website for airflights.co.uk listed in Google News. The article listed seemed very suspicious so I ran it through Copyscape and found that sure enough, it was taken from an article directory.

The article published on airflights.co.uk was this one, published on May 19th. This article was copied from this website, which published the article on May 15th.

Not strictly against the rules of the article site, but certainly against Google’s TOS. You can’t duplicate content from other websites and expect to rank for it. However, not only have airflights.co.uk duplicated content, they managed to get that content listed with Google News, which is ridiculous. Does this mean that Google’s news service is going to become full of duplicate content and spam results?

It shouldn’t as Google News has a manual review process in order to gain entry, so anything like this really should flagged up. Checking Copyscape is one of the first things I do when I look at a website for SEO, so you’d think Google would be on top of that, wouldn’t you?

Even so I filed a spam report for Google, so hopefully they’ll do something about it, but history shows that spam reports filed to Google don’t necessarily have much impact.

We’ll see if this one gets anywhere as I’ll be monitoring Google News for airflights.co.uk to see if their duplicate content continues to get indexed as news, when it isn’t.

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