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…
Previously, WebOptimizes/Qtonix had offered to ‘help’ with my big Christmas site, now they want to help my Easter site, because it too seems to have lots wrong with it! Let’s see what they say this time…
This email came from a Stacy who was using an @weboptimizes.com email, although in subsequent replies she also cc-ed in Nancy from Qtonix. (weboptimizes.com isn’t a real site). [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 there,
I noticed something interesting while going through your website, whyeaster.comIt’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 whyeaster.com
I believe you would like to come top on searches for keywords related to: whyeaster.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,
Stacy Marshall | Digital Marketing Specialist
So I replied and got a reply from Stacy. Although www.whyeaster.com isn’t as big as my Christmas information site (www.whychristmas.com), it’s still already VERY well ranked on Google.
Their Report & Recommendations
Like with their communication about my Christmas site, the report/audit I received from them was a PDF file and looked very thorough. However, again, it contained a great deal of mis-information, scare tactics and out of date information.
Again: 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/
Again: 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.
Again: It claimed the images didn’t have alt tags – they do.
Again: It claimed the site didn’t have an XML sitemap. There is an XML sitemap, in the place that XML sitemaps usually are, they just hadn’t found it.
Again: It claimed the page loading time wasn’t good. The site loads in 439ms. WebOptimizes seems to think that’s ‘Not Good’. In fact, that’s a very fast loading time and is over SEVEN times faster than their own sites loads!
Again: They recommend that the site needs to be listed on the ‘DMOZ’ and ‘Yahoo’ Directories. The fact that both of these directories have been closed for well over a year didn’t seem to be of any relevance…!
They said that the site needs to have accounts on Social Media platforms. Well, yes it could. However, I use the ‘whychristmas’ accounts for ‘whyeaster’ things as well… BUT they also recommend that it be listed on Google+. The problem with that is that Google+ is closing in about two weeks time (April 2nd) and Google stopped accepted new accounts on it over a month ago (Feb 4th)!
Like with whychristmas, they also say that the site needs to listed on ‘local’ business listings, like Google My Business (which they call Google Places – it’s not been called that for years…). If they had spent more than two minutes on either of the sites, it would have been obvious that this isn’t a business with a ‘business place’, so it’s pointless being listed on local business listings.
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 now has no errors. Nice! Last year it had 3 errors & 21 warnings – so they’ve made an improvement there! Oh and my site has no errors either!
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 55/100 (up a whole 4 points since last time)
Mobile: 18/100 (still as TERRIBLE as it was before!!!)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 99/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
On GTMetrix their site gets:
D (64%) / C (30%) – that’s an improvement since my first post about their services.
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 94% / A (94%) – so again much better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, my site got a clean bill of health.
Previously – their site wouldn’t even load in it and just threw up errors! Now it does load but has 6 errors and 17 alerts. Looking at their code, there are also several semantic code issues. (Their main logo doesn’t even have any text on it – that’s terrible!)
They now do have a privacy policy on their site – good.
But it’s not easily found on every page – not good.
Conclusion
It seems that a couple of things have improved on the Qtonix site. However, sadly it seem like the ‘free report and audits’ from WebOptimzes hasn’t got any better at all…
The fact that they recommend being listed on two directories which haven’t existed for over a year and that I should use a social media platform which is dead, really does not inspire confidence.
Oh, and they’re still sending me spam about my Christmas site as well!
But the choice, as ever, is yours.
Hi James, well done and thanks for sorting this out for me (anyway). I was about to engage, not seriously, just out of curiosity, like you did. The spam email did look a little more authentic than the usual repetitive stuff that comes through 10 times a day. This is about weboptimizes.com btw. I run a joinery and have been trying to optimise my site on and off without much success. I’m not really into it as it seems such a huge prospect /chore and probably beyond my scope anyway… Give me a chunk of wood and I’ll make that work instead, each to their own.
Hi Max, I’m glad the post has helped you! I’ve had FOUR spam email from Weboptimizes (the spammy front end of Qtonix) just in the last week. They’re still up to their old spammy tricks!