I’m not saying ALL SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies employ dirty tricks in trying to get their clients’ websites on the first page of google search but the one I hired did (probably one of my biggest mistake).
Last year, I hired a SEO company to optimize one of my new sites. The company required an initial deposit and then monthly payments if my site reach certain rankings in the three search engines. I can’t remember all the details but I think they get paid if it’s at the top 20 of the search engines results and the amount paid is higher if it’s at the top 3, top 10. You get the drift.
Since it’s a payment based on performance thingi, I signed up, gave them the FTP access to my site and let them do their thing.
After a few months, I still did not see a significant improvement in terms of traffic and I decided to terminate the service.
Recently, I logged in to the File Manager (cPanel) of the site and noticed that there are 2 css files in it. Curiuos, I clicked on one and was shocked to see codes to hide text. I deleted the said css file and went to my site. I could my site’s keywords and description in a bigger font. Those keywords and description were hidden using the css codes. I quickly performed a search on all the files of the site and deleted the offending codes. Any bots would have noticed the hidden keywords when crawling but real human visitors would not have seen the codes.
I cannot believe it took me this long to find out. I’m still wondering if I should submit a reconsideration/reinclusion request to google since my site is still indexed. Only the rankings has dropped. It dropped a couple of months ago but I didn’t pay much attention to it as I thought it was due to lack of external links pointing to the site.
So if you are hiring a SEO company to optimize your site’s rankings, do check what are they doing and keep track of things.
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