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Our company signed up with an SEO company and we paid them a significant amount of money up front.
We gave them our website and they did their work.
It turns out what they did was add a Hidden Layer into the top of each of our webpages and filled
it with the keywords and links to their other customers websites.
My understanding now - This is against Googles and other SE's Guidelines and could get our site
removed from the search engines,?.
We have put this to the SEO but they say that's how they achieve the results and it is 'unlikely' you will be banned.
Worried by this we asked for a refund because we were not made aware of the risks.
They refused.
They are claiming such techniques are normal practice in the industry and it's what all SEO companies do.
To get our money back our only option would be to take them to the small claims court, but how on earth do we convince
a 50year old judge who knows nothing about websites that what they have done is wrong.
Googles guidelines page isn't really very good evidence!.
I don't suppose anyone has come across this sort of thing before. Any thoughts/input would be very much appreciated.
Andy
it is 'unlikely' you will be banned
Sort of like saying "it is unlikely that small children will choke on some parts from this product" so it is okay for children of all ages. Or it is "unlikely that you will get cancer from using our product." It demonstrates willful negligence (is that redundant?) on their part.
As for the judge, I think that you would be able to show that their tactic is in violation of the Google TOU. You paid them to improve your search results placement. Since they are "experts" in the search engine industry, it was reasonable of you to expect that they would do their work in accordance with the terms of use of all targeted engines.
(these are my opinions, I'm not a lawyer)
I have worse experience than that, one member of our development team broke the site on purpose .
I went to district attorney / police they said there is no physical sign of damage so nothing happened.
Funny aaaih
If you can fix this by restoring the site from a backup before passing this on to the next SEO, please do so.
Depending upon the industry there is a fine line between generally acceptable SEO practices and some of the black hat practices. Just because someone steps over the line of Google's guidelines doesn't mean they have done you a disservice.
Not all SEO'ers will tell you exactly what it is that they do. I would suggest you find one with a willingness to be a bit more forthcoming in describing their practices prior to engagement in the future.
The important thing here is to recognize what parts of the problem can be dealt with by you in an effective manner and which parts can not. Move on. Fix you site. Get it SEO'd properly, don't do drugs, stay in the shade and drink plenty of water.
You should be better informed or give more instructions. SEO is a iffy field. I wouldn't ask for money back I'd learn from experience, do research here and find out whats right and wrong.
Google can get pissy over anything, stories here will tell that some are better reasons that other whether or not they are stated in their TOS. :)
You don't tell a contract killer you want your money back when you find out they killed the dood rather than rough them up. I mean theyre job title is to get the stuff done :D Then the side effects, what happens when theyre pissed off you want money back.
(i dont do contract killing or blackhat seo)
Are you UK based? If so the following may help otherwise probably not
From your description I feel you have a very valid case and will win in such an action.
From what you described and presuming there isn't any contradicting evidence (contracts, T&Cs etc.) then basis of the claim would be in showing whether the the hidden DIVs are considered normal or best practice in SEO.
Take into account Google's own guidelines as well as there market share and I believe that it can be shown that hidden DIVs are contrary to best practice or even worst practice in optimising your site.
The benefactor of the hidden DIVs isn't you but the SEO company and their other clients.
Optimising for other companies' sites is not what you paid them for so I do believe this is a relatively simple matter.
It would assist if you have a solicitor that is familiar with SEO and web usage but there are many of those out there.
Good luck
Thank you for your feedback
Yes we are uk based. So is the SEO company.
We don't want to have to pay for a solicitor but i think the small claims court is worth a try because this only costs £30 to submit.
Googles guideline page isn't clear on this. i.e. it doesn't go as far to say if you do this and are found out you will be banned.
SEO does involve some manipulation and i'm worried their argument that using such techniques are standard practice in the SEO industry would get them off.
If i can't find actual 'written' documentation that this practice could get us banned i'm not sure we would win the case. Because we are suing we have to ensure we provide the evidence.
There really should be clearer guidelines for this.
It seems i could setup as a seo, promise people top ten listings and just fill their websites with hidden keywords and links without a care in the world.
Just to reply to this bit. It appears to help us to unfortunately. They link other websites to us in the same way. They are appear to have hundreds of clients. Each site links to 20 other customers.
It appears to help us to unfortunately.
I disagree.
What they do on their other clients websites is not your concern.
The issue is specifically does the hidden div on YOUR site assist you?
The answer is clearly no.
If it simply involves writing a check to someone to "do SEO", you can be pretty sure they are either cloaking the site or doing something like what was mentioned, or else just buying text links to up the PR.
Unfortunately we were invoiced no credit card.
If there is anyone who has a link to a good site preferably a search engine that clearly states using hidden content could get a site removed from a search engine i'd really appreciate it.
Googles website statement on this subject is very poor:
-----
Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
-----
This is only 'recommendation'. We really need something more convincing :(
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Look at your contract with them, it must say somewhere exactly what you are paying them for. If they didn't do what they said they would then it's just a matter of small claims tribunal and there aint no judges there.
If the contract says something like, "we can not guarantee that we will actually get you a better ranking, but we will do everything that we believe will acheive it", then put it down as a bad experience.
On another point, even if it made it to the House of Lords, you havent got a case against them for violating Gs policies because theres no law preventing them from doing so. Anybody can write up a policy, for the most part they mean nothing.
On the big picture, if your site did advance in rank, then pay up and thank them. My long term advice however is that search engine optimisation is an ongoing, virtually daily task.
On another point, even if it made it to the House of Lords, you havent got a case against them for violating Gs policies because theres no law preventing them from doing so. Anybody can write up a policy, for the most part they mean nothing.
If you contracted these people to optimize your site, simply the work order in the proposed work should have explained what the SEO company was going to do.
Do you have a contract and work agreement? What about consultation documentation?
Contracts do wonders when proving your case.
I have not seen any mention of contract
Any business relationship may have many implied obligations and duties.
If I take the car to a garage for a tune-up, I do not need to get them to sign an inifinitely long list of the bad things I do not want them to do to my vehicle. They have a duty of care towards it and me.
Whether that is true of an unlicensed SEO is a matter undecided by the courts, as far as I know.
This would be far from a car tune-up.
Protecting your business investment should be the highest priority. This is where a work agreement or contract would be established.
However - I have had clients that just want to pay for the services, and don't care what or how the job gets done. Dangerous. I don't take projects like this unless both parties agree and understand what work is taking place. This is the protection of both parties... Save me the headache as well.
;)
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients
That states pretty clearly that this is not benifitting you.
Finally, we broke down and joined one of these programs. Unfortunately, the program used hidden links, and Google removed us from the index within a week.
That is on the left of that page. Google putting that on there page is pretty close to saying that we romove you if you do this.
