Forum Moderators: phranque
The client has now refused to pay and they are in the # 1 position for their main keyword.
What should/could I do?
I'm a skeptic though - I wonder why a "friend" would do that to someone. Were you really the reason they got to number one or did it happen by chance and the "friend" figured this out?
If in fact you did do ALL the work to get them there and he doesn't pay you after a phone call then: I agree with Demaestro. Screw Karma. They know what they did to you if in fact you did all the work. If you have access to their site - exclude bots.
"Why have they refused to pay?"
You need to get to the bottom of that one before you can do anything.
TJ
It was mentioned before but I will echo it, how long once you stop putting in effort until their rank slips back into the depths of the Next Page>>> link.
You can hope that when that happens they will come to you for help and you can ask for the amount owning before you start on new work. Oh yeah and make a contract. Friends are friends and business is business and if your friend can't understand why you have to protect your business with a contract then his payment intentions can't be good to begin with.
I had a friend once whm Id known for years, borrow some money. He'd lost his at the same time his girlfriend did and neither could pay the rent and food, so I helped out.
never saw a penny back but he found enough money to buy a portable PC.
You never really know a friend until money is involved.
Do you think a car dealer would "let it go" if you didn't pay your agreement?
I'm all for good Karma, but when other people start their own bad Karma......well, they just have to deal with it. ;-)
If there was a contract I would be all over the robots.txt to disallow.
Another good suggestion that will keep you out of legal hot water was a few pages back but it was to the effect of setting up a spoof site and trying to increase his competitors ranking through linking and other tricks you may have up your sleeve. Underhanded but it might make you feel better when you go to bed.
Perhaps arguably a moral equivalent, but not a legal equivalent. When you sign for an auto loan, there's language in your contract that explicitly gives the lendor the right to repossess the car if you don't meet the contract terms, and even to take certain specified actions to do so. Without that agreement, it wouldn't be legal.
"The big unanswered question in this thread is this one:-"Why have they refused to pay?"
and my guess is that the answer is:
Because he doesn't feel like it.
I know several people that act like this:
No Contract
No apparent repercussions
If the client is pretty sure you won't sue him, he's not going to do anything.
I am currently dealing with an arrogant SOB who used some of my copyrighted material for profit, doesn't want to pay the bill I sent him and thinks that since there is no "evidence" he is not paying.
Unfortunately for him, he admitted what he did in several emails, then basically dared me to come after him.
I suspect this will end up in Federal Court for Copyright Violation for a $250 bill.
I suspect this will end up in Federal Court for Copyright Violation for a $250 bill.
Why bother? Principle? Sometimes it's just better to let things be. Karma will eventually come into play. Why would you want to invest your time and money to pursue a $250 bill?
Same goes for the discussion at hand. If there were no contractual agreements, down payments, etc. then you can only hold yourself responsible for the outcome. No need to take my tax dollars and try to drag this into the court system. It's just not worth it.
Client didn't pay? Small dollar amount? Learn the lesson and move forward. You'll know better next time. We've all made the same mistake and we all know that we learn best when we make those mistakes ourselves. ;)
setting up a spoof site
If you're bent on revenge, look for an affiliate program in the same sector to base a real site on, not a spoof site, then SEO it to the top. Ordinarily I'd say not to push affiliate merchants in the same sector where one has an SEO client, but if you got stung for the fee he's not your client so there's no conflict. It could be a productive way to recycle the research you did for his site.
But before you do much of that, take a hard, realistic look at whether you'd be further ahead in the long run to focus on something that you built for more positive reasons. Revenge can be sweet, but just like refined sugar it doesn't provide true nourishment or build lasting strength ... for either your business or your soul.
The universe has a way of looking after stuff like this: someone whose word cannot be trusted will eventually fail because others will stop doing business with him too. Time wounds all heels.
I'd consider that perfectly ethical in the circumstances.
Not only is that completely unethical, it's also quite possibly illegal.
You can't go making changes to someone elses website without their express permission.
TJ
I see absolutely nothing unethical about that, assuming he still has normal access to the site.
undoing some of the work
Which he had permission to do.....
returning things to what they were like before he did the work.
.... for which he does not have permission to do.
NOT paid
That's a debt. Nothing more, nothing less.
TJ
If they are refusing to pay for what he did, then by definition they think that what he did is of no value.
Restoring unsatisfactory work to its previous condition is a legitimate way to deal with a dissatisfied customer.
Client didn't pay? Small dollar amount? Learn the lesson and move forward.
Yes this is a great idea, let them all know that you will bend over, spread, and take it deep. Word of mouth can work both ways, do you want it known that people can stiff you and you will just be like:
"Oh well it is less then $300, I guess I can eat that"
Bull poopy, Karma will get him yes, but who will be karma's vessel? Karma has no feet to kick you in the ass with, so it will allocate someones foot and use that, it might as well be your foot karma swings.
When a product is not paid for then it can be reclaimed, it is unfortunate that services cannot be retracted in the same manner. Even if some people feel their tax dollars could be better spent the courts are an option. Don't forget it is your tax dollars too.
If you are hosting their site I would tell them you can no longer provide that service to them, tell them they have 2 weeks to find someone else to host, allocate them 10 Mb of transfer until you move them and just tell them you are serveing all ties with them. Nothing wrong with that. There are many things you can do that aren't illegal. I just don't like the idea of letting it go. how many times would you let this go before you decide you aren't going to get screwed over anymore?
Client didn't pay? Small dollar amount? Learn the lesson and move forward.
Yes this is a great idea, let them all know that you will bend over, spread, and take it deep. Word of mouth can work both ways, do you want it known that people can stiff you and you will just be like: "Oh well it is less then $300, I guess I can eat that" Bull poopy, Karma will get him yes, but who will be karma's vessel? Karma has no feet to kick you in the ass with, so it will allocate someones foot and use that, it might as well be your foot karma swings.
Ummm, I do believe you took that out of context. If you find yourself in this situation more than once, your at fault. My comments were aimed at the one time experience.
It's probably time to change your pricing model. If you are chasing the type of client that would stiff you for payment, then you need to rethink your pricing structure. There is only one real structure that works in this scenario and that is 50% down and 50% before delivery.
I sort of agree with you in principle. However, if the client wants to hide behind the no contract argument, then technically Steelbank (the original poster) did NOT have permission in the first place to make changes to the site. By putting things back to the way things were originally, he is merely just reverting back to the status quo.
Depending on the exact work done, Steelbank would be justified in putting up a brand new site of his own with those changes. However, the situation is a little dicey since it's SEO work and not a whole website, it might be a little more difficult to do this.
We had a client who wouldn't pay for extra work we did. Yes, we had a contract, but we made some agreed to do some extra changes before finalizing an addendum to the contract. (I was completely against doing any extra work without the contract, but I got overruled.)
You guessed it- the client refused to pay for the extra work. So we just FTPed our backup copy of the site (the state of the site before our additional changes) to their server. Note- the drastic action was only done after weeks of asking for payment and finally getting an absolute "we are not going to pay" from the manager.
We told them we would FTP the extra changes back to the site after payment was received. They still refused. They didn't have a backup of the new site, so they had to make all the new changes from scratch.
The funny thing is that they hired an ex-employee who was involved with the original site development. However, she didn't have the programming skills to duplicate the work we did (she was more involved with the original site design than the programming side). Nor did they have the language skills (this was a multilingual site) that we had in-house. So months later they ended up with a site with a lot less functionality, worse design, and probably ended up spending more than if they had just paid us like they said they would. Plus they have no SEO skills in-house, so the site doesn't do much more than make the manager happy to look at. :)
It is hard to take back a service. It isn't like a product that you can repocess.
If I landscape your lawn and you don't pay me, I can't go dig up your yard. I would probably get charged with trespassing and destruction of private property.
Just cut your ties off with him and if you really have invested a lot of time and you have a knowlage of his business and marketing models then just become his competetor and blow his a$$ out of the water.
If I landscape your lawn and you don't pay me, I can't go dig up your yard. I would probably get charged with trespassing and destruction of private property.
On the other hand, if you buy a car and don't pay for it, they can come repossess it.
And in the case of the lawn, you can file small claims, and/or turn it over to a collection agency. BTW, this has not happened to us much, but in the few times it has we also file a report with the credit agencies.
Or just do it the easy way - put a 301 redirect in their htaccess file to a porn site with tons of spyware :)
If you decide to keep the friend, then at a minimum make him sign a letter or recommendation and be a referral but make it clear you won't do any more work on the site without compensation if he's really making money.
If you need to feed your family and it's a more pressing issue than keeping the friend then I don't see the problem here, if it was verbal or on paper it sounds like you have an agreement he's backing out of and no judge will believe you're working for this guy for free for your own amusement.
Don't know how much is at stake here but I think your least expensive way to get money back is small claims court, some max out at $5k, you'll need all correspondence and detailed accounting of time and expenses walking in the door to win anything, and at this point in most states you need to send an invoice for your work and follow up with collection attempts for at least 120 days or something to prove he's just not paying.
Just document in detail everything you've done and do from this point forward.
I would totally advise against NOT touching his site from this point forward unless you host it, then I would just disable the account for non-payment ;)
This may sound harsh, but the fact that you worked for a whole year without insisting upon any payment whatsoever leads me to think you really have no one but yourself to blame. You're lucky (only in principle) that the site ranked, because making your pay contingent upon Google's whims was deeply stupid.
Walk away. You've paid your tuition; hopefully you've learned the lesson it bought.
Send a letter by post instructing them that you are charging interest and at what rate it is being charged, backdate this to the date the invoice was due.
Once the dollar amount plus interest IS enough to warrant taking it to court, do so.
Secondly, is this question by Steelbank:
How about removing the site from the SE's? Is there a way to have the site removed?
It seems that any SEO that knows how to get a site to rank in the search engines should know the answer to this question.
Maybe, the friend realized that Steelbank did not know what he was doing. Perhaps we’ll never know.
That was the best suggestion, I have a situation where I can use that.
Cheers.
