This is one in a series of posts reviewing and looking at how some of the SEO companies which use bulk emails/spam with ‘we can help your terrible site’ type emails really can (and actually mostly can’t!) help your site.
Read some simple explanations of some of the SEO terms used on this post…
This email came from an Adam who was using an @weboptimizes.com email, although in subsequent replies he talked about using their main site qtonix.com. (weboptimizes.com isn’t a real site). In my experience, weboptimizes.com is about the worst serial SEO spammer… [Edit November 2021: it now appears that they’re also using the domain smartwebexpert.com to spam people. Edit March 2023: They’re also using appwithoutcodes.com]
Hi whychristmas.com Team,
I noticed something interesting while going through your website, whychristmas.com
It’s apparent that you have used Adwords marketing to promote your business in the past, however your website does see some organic search traffic here and there. Now, I believe I can help increase that portion of organic traffic significantly, at whychristmas.com
I believe you would like to come top on searches for keywords related to: whychristmas.com … I found a number of SEO issues such as broken links, page speed issue, HTML validation errors, images with no ALT text on your website, that’s stopping you from getting that traffic.
How about I fix those, and also promote you through engaging content on relevant places on the web (read, social media).
I guarantee you will see a drastic change in your search ranking and traffic once these issues are fixed. Also, this is one time, so no paying adwords every month.
Is this something you are interested in?
If yes, please allow me to send you a no obligation audit report and quote.
Hoping to hear from you and take this partnership ahead.
Best Regards,
Adam Gibbs
SEO-Consultant
So I replied and got a reply from Adam. This SEO spam was for my big Christmas information site (www.whychristmas.com). During each December it gets millions and millions of visits and is #1 on the whole of Google for a huge number of Christmas searches – so any SEO advice about the site is always ‘interesting’…
Their Report & Recommendations
The report/audit I received from them was a PDF file and looked very thorough. However, it contained a great deal of mis-information, scare tactics, out of date information (including saying the site wasn’t listed on two directories that haven’t actually existed for over year..! and the site was listed on both directories before they closed…).
It claimed that that site didn’t have things like social media accounts that if they’d spent five seconds on they site they would have easily found.
It claimed that the site needed ‘dedicated IP’ address to stop my site being associated with other ‘bad sites’. This is a myth: https://www.seoblog.com/2017/09/dedicated-address-improve-rankings/
It claimed that the Title Relevancy and Keywords on the site were pretty terrible. (but without actually knowing what keywords I was targeting…). This is just a scare tactic.
It claimed the images didn’t have alt tags – they do.
It claimed the site didn’t have an HTML or XML sitemap. A link to the HTML sitemap is in the footer on every page of the site(!); there is an XML sitemap, they just hadn’t found it.
It claimed the page loading time of 484ms is ‘Not Good’. That’s just ridiculous. That’s a very fast loading time and over SEVEN times faster than their own sites loads!
So a rather problematic report! (well for them…)
Looking at Their Site
With SEO spammers, I also like to look at their sites, to see if they practice what they preach (I mean would you trust a plumber who had leaking and rusty pipes all over their own house?!); and also to compare their site with a site they say they can help…
Their site is: https://www.qtonix.com
For HTML Validation, their site got: 3 errors & 21 warnings – my site has none!
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 51/100
Mobile: 18/100 (THAT’S TERRIBLE!!!)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 98/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
On GTMetrix their site gets:
D (62%) / D (63%)
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 98% / A (90%) – so again much better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, my site got a clean bill of health – their site wouldn’t even load in it and throws errors! But looking at their code, I could see several semantic and accessibility issues. (Their main logo doesn’t even have any text on it – that’s terrible!)
They also didn’t have any privacy policy on the site – really not good.
Conclusion
I certainly wouldn’t use the services of weboptimizes/Qtonix. The report/audit they sent for my site isn’t worth the bit of paper you would print it on!
Qtonix also trade as ‘SEO Company USA’ although they’re head office is actually based in Bhubaneswar, India (like Skylite Web). I have nothing against Indian based companies. But claiming you’re a big US based company, when you’re not, is another reason to take anything they say with a very large pinch of salt…
The choice is yours, but if one of the seemingly many people from weboptimizes.com emails you, the delete button might be your friend.