Re: SEO Service Help!
I KNOW there are some good SEO people out there. But I once had a nice, short domain name set up for my store - a 5 character dot com name. I paid a company $2,000 to do some SEO. They looked very professional and I saw some nice reviews of the company that looked very authentic.
Everything looked good for a few weeks, my site was rising in the Google rankings and some of my items were even making it to page one. I WAS ECSTATIC! Then, one day, it all stopped. My site had been banned by Google. Apparently they were breaking the rules and using link farms and a bunch of other stuff that Google didn't like.
I was extremely pissed off! I had spent HUNDREDS OF HOURS on the website and had it looking REALLY GOOD, with a lot of original descriptions for my items that I had written myself. I had a few hundred items listed. I was on the Volusion platform and made sure that all of my pics were optimized to take advantage of the rollover magnification feature. I was absolutely FLOORED when this happened.
I called them and demanded a refund. They refused, telling me that it must have been something that *I* did to cause the site to get banned. I spoke with my lawyer, but the company was located in California. I would have to get an attorney in California to sue them. I would most likely have had to go there at some point to testify in court. And even then, my results were not guaranteed.
So my website, hundreds of hours of work and two thousand dollars got flushed right down the toilet. Not to mention the $100 a month I was paying Volusion, the $40 or so monthly fee for my merchant account, 500 boxes that I had printed with my domain name, etc.
Unless a company comes PERSONALLY RECOMMENDED to me, I will NEVER make that mistake again! I have hired a couple of companies to do certain aspects of SEO, but I am VERY CLEAR about what I want done, what I am authorizing them to do and I make sure they agree to do NOTHING ELSE without my permission.
It is just too easy to end up going with some company that has hired an inexperienced person to handle my account and then I get screwed. Most of them MEAN WELL, but if SEO is executed incorrectly, it can do more harm than good.
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