SEO Blog

The wrong choice for the wrong reasons
Posted on: 23/01/2013 - 16:45 | Comments:0

Very recently, I had a new experience. I lost a potential customer to another online marketing company.

Normally, once I follow an online enquiry, carry out preliminary research, exchange a few emails and finally talk to the customer, I tend to, without blowing my own trumpet too much, get the contract.

I am not a salesman and I have been known to waffle on at times, but, like most SEO guys who are worth their salt, I know my stuff and am able to convey that quite clearly, earning the trust of the person I am dealing with. Obviously, this time, this did not happen. The funny thing is that we actually went the extra mile with this customer. I felt that he was nervous about making a bad decision (and who can blame him?) so I actually offered him something that we have never offered any other client before. We offered him a sample of our service. We actually sourced 3 excellent links for his site, ranking one of his selected key phrases completely for free. At time of writing, this keyword is sitting firmly at number 6 on Google.co.uk purely from the work we carried out.

In truth, I don’t actually know why he decided against using our services. Maybe it’s because I was not too happy accepting his request for a document detailing our strategy; after all, surely showing him the results first hand by giving him a sample of our services should speak much louder than a piece of paper full of promises? Besides, we are in a very competitive business and we need to protect ourselves from rival businesses snooping around.

Thing is... it’s annoying. Not annoying because I was desperate for the work (Although we can always do with more work right?). Not annoying because it hurt my ego (yes, it has a little). And no, not annoying because I spent time and effort to really demonstrate our abilities. No; none of those. The genuine, bottom of my heart, pure truth is: I am annoyed because in 2 or 3 months time, when I will undoubtedly check his progress, I know what I am going to find. Yes, that whiter than white, clean link profile will be full of those majestic black dots that anyone who uses Majestic Explorer will recognise as pure spam. So yes, even though a true business man would chalk it down as a lost client and get on with it; I know I won’t. I will check in a few months time this lost client’s site and, I fear, I will grunt and sigh as I go through his newly acquired link profile built by his, in my honest opinion, wrongly chosen SEO company.

Let’s hope I’m wrong and that this SEO Company will deliver on their promises and provide him with good quality links. Then at least, I might just be able to put this to rest. Unfortunately, experience tells me otherwise.

Reboot's new promotional clip
Posted on: 13/12/2012 - 21:41 | Comments:0

Sword Wielding Google
Posted on: 18/11/2012 - 14:23 | Comments:0



It’s true to say that Kate gets her fair share of calls from companies needing assistance in getting themselves out of one search engine penalty or another. The one common theme is that they are mostly all small businesses. They mostly carry out search engine optimisation themselves and in some cases subcontract some ‘services’ to offshore SEO companies or anonymous people on various forums. But, there is one more disturbing aspect to these stories. In almost all cases, these are internet based (read reliant) businesses. In simple terms, this translates to this simple formula:

Search Engine Penalty = Bankruptcy Risk


Now, I know we have spoken previously about how, in an ideal world, a business should never be reliant on one stream of customers and how cowboy SEO can get you into trouble but what I want to touch on today is the scary reality of the amazing power that a company like Google holds.

I would love to hear from others if they are aware of any other entity in the UK business eco system which wields such a powerful sword over the small-medium business neck? The ability to hand out such decisive blows, to destroy with complete disregard or consideration to the human cost of such actions is, as far as I’m aware, non-existent without being regulated in some way or another. The Banks have ombudsmen, the police have the IPCC and lawyers have The Law Society while the press answer to OFCOM but who do Google and Bing answer to? (Apart from their shareholders that is)

Yes, I know, they provide a service and it’s their search engine so they can do what they like with it. I have heard that argument countless times, but when a service becomes such an integral part, a crucial cog, in the economy of a whole nation it crosses the line from being just a service owned by a company to an essential service which should be regulated and have some form of checks and balances put in place to protect businesses from the current unpredictable and in some cases unforgiving nature of the World Wide Web.

Stray Robots.txt command
Posted on: 06/11/2012 - 12:24 | Comments:0

A very quick post today but wanted to just highlight this tale of a cost cutting exercise gone wrong and really what we, here at Reboot, are trying to combat on a daily basis.

Approximately 2 weeks ago, I received a call from a potential customer in trouble. "All our rankings have tanked" he said in a tone that can only be described as a desperate call for help. I agreed to get Kate (our resident penalty recovery expert) to have a look. Penalties are so common these days and one of our best sources of new clients so the assumption was easy to make. It did not take Kate more than 5 minutes to discover that what the said site had was not a penalty, but a badly written Robots.txt file which mistakenly disallowed all traffic from Google-bot causing it to completely remove the site from Google’s index. Basically, what transpired was that the owner of the site used a chain of off shore (in this case, Indian) SEO companies. He also provided FTP details to them on a regular basis. One of those "companies" managed to get his site completely de-indexed from Google with one wrong command on one file.

Please don’t trust just anyone with your FTP details. Keep them secure, and if a company you are working with, especially if they are offshore, need to make changes to your website, asked them to detail the changes in an email, with explanation to what each change is for and pass those instructions to your webmaster to carry out.

Suffice to say that this morning, after Kate fixed the error, the site has been re-indexed and subsequently reclaimed its rightful place in the rankings. This error cost the company an estimated loss of £22,000 due to the loss of traffic over the two week period. We did not charge a penny for the analysis and fix and now we have a brand new client joining our fast growing list.

Google launches a new "Disavow Links" tool.
Posted on: 17/10/2012 - 08:46 | Comments:0

Well, it seems that months after Bing has released a similar tool, Google has again followed in their footsteps and introduced their own Link Disavow tool. 2012 will be looked at as the year where Google has really started clamping down on all types of black hat link building campaigns and as a direct result, have completely obliterated thousands of sites and, as a consequence, thousands of businesses that are heavily relied on Google traffic.

It is true that many of these sites did not deserve to rank where they ranked as they hired SEO agencies or even have done the SEO themselves and have accumulated as a direct result thousands of spammy links. Well, people make mistakes and we view it as a good move from Google to allow the owners of those sites to take some measurable action against past mistakes. It is well worth watching the below video and reading the link included as it plainly makes it clear that the actual removal of the bad links should still be your number one priority and only after every effort was exhausted, you should use the tool as a last ditch effort to remove any bad reputation flowing from spammy links.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disav...

We will of course look into this much closer in the near future so stay tuned for updates.