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 a Jessica who was using a digitalmarketingline.com email, although a subsequent reply came from another Jessica (with a different surname!) from Runexe Solutions with a runexesolutions.com email. (Rather interesting, digitalmarketingline.com forwards to a yet another SEO company [usseoexpert.com] who claim to be from Michigan, although that domain was registered in India, just like digitalmarketingline.com, and it was registered exactly 14 days after digitalmarketingline.com, hmmmmm).
Hi whychristmas.com,
Hope you are doing fantastic.
I am Jessica Sr. Web Analyser having 9+ years of experience in Search Engine Marketing, Social media Marketing, Content Marketing, Pay-per-click, Video Marketing etc.
While analysing your website, we tracked some pitfalls for which your website doesn’t show up within top search results on search engines including Google. In addition to the same, we found that whychristmas.com is not able to achieve appropriate traffic/visitors for a couple of months
I am quite impressed with your website – Business Concept, Content, Call-to-Actions and others. As a web analyser, I can recommend few things to improve the website performance and I hope my suggestions will help business & your website.
My suggestions:
• Publish Relevant Content (Blogs, Micro blogs, Article, Business Bio and etc.)
• Update Your Content regularly for quick crawling
• Go for variation keywords and website optimization
• Update Best Title Metadata, Description Metadata, Keyword Metadata
• Go for Social media marketing for more engagement and social media traffic
• Work on Page Loading speed and fix it to load within seconds
• Go for Content marketing and Video marketing
• Implement Latest Industry Specific Schema so you stand out as compared to your competitors’not sure, if you can understand all above technical terms or not. Not to be worried, I will help to make you understand about the above points with brief descriptions.
If you have a technical team then I will wish you to go ahead and work on the above factors or if you prefer then I can help you to work on the above points.
If you are comfortable to go for a online meeting then please let me know. If you need to know about the cost then please revert back to my email and I will be happy to send you the quote with brief recommendation.
Thanks, I look forward to your reply.
Regards,
Jessica RoyWeb Analyser
Caution: This is our marketing strategy that we use the Gmail. If you want to receive detailed plan of action, please feel free to reply. Yes, we will get back to you with details.
You’ll notice that in the email footer it says that they use Gmail for initial contact (ahem, spamming) – but Jessica sent this from a digitalmarketingline.com email! (I guess they forgot to edit their spam template…)
So I replied to Jessica and got a reply from a different Jessica! 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 in the form of an email, which is shown below. (But without two pricing tables as they didn’t come over from the email well!)
Hello James,
Thanks for showing your interest in our digital marketing services; it’s a pleasure to hear from you.
Let me give you a quick introduction about Runexesolutions. It is a leading digital marketing agency with over 5 years of experience having a database of more than 3000+ clients.
Our headquarters are in Miami, Florida however; our delivery center is in India. We expertise in digital marketing, content marketing, online reputation management, pay per click, web design, development, branding, social media promotion among other services. For more details about our services please visit our website: https://runexesolutions.com/
As per our current analysis, your website can drive much more quality organic traffic with our various strategies which could boost your business. Also, it has a lot of technical issues in the back end which is hindering the Google spider to crawl in your web page. Few errors are mentioned below:
Title Tag: The title is 126 characters long. The title should not exceed 80 characters.
The Text to HTML ratio is 10.14 %: Original content is by far the single most important element to search engines. Low Text to HTML the ratio indicates little content for search engines to index. We consider it to be good practice to have a Text to HTML ratio of at least 20% and ideal above 30%
W3C Markup Validation : Status: FAILED [1 errors, 0 warning]
Google Page Speed score: 49% (Low)
Favicon: No hi-resolution (192×192) icon found.
Keyword consistency is not good.
We found a total of 51 links out of which 5 are duplicate links.
IP Canonicalization: No, your site’s IP 104.24.102.73 does not redirect to whychristmas.com.
Hence, we will advise going for various SEO strategies where we can fix the technical issues (on-site and on-page optimization), keyword optimization (will target keywords relating to your business for the target geographical markets), SMO etc.
Let me give you a brief outline of how our services can benefit you. Below is the step by step process that we will implement on your website if you decide to sign up with us:
Complete Analysis of the website with a recommendation from our technical team.
The on-site recommendation that we need to fix to make the website more search engine friendly.
Keyword Analysis on your website along with the recommendation (number of keywords depend upon the budget)
On-page recommendations depending upon the keywords approved from your end.
Link Building Descriptions (LBD) recommendation with focus keywords.
Backlink creation with LBD for your website.
Off-Page Content Creation like blog, article, pdf, ppt etc. (number depends on the budget).
Off-Page content posting on relevant websites for visitor improvement.
Google Analytics & Webmaster Integration and monitoring.
Social Media promotion.
The above-mentioned activities will not only help in increasing the ranking of the website but also the traffic to your website. However, let me be very clear to you that you will see an increase in keywords rankings from the very first month and improvements their after.
Pricing: The pricing of our base service starts at just $199/month. However, packages can be customized as per the specific business requirement. Analyzing your website and business we suggest you go for at least 12 to 15 keywords. Please find the below plans suggested for your website.
{There were then the pricing tables for packages at $199 or $299 a month!}
Please advise a suitable time to discuss further.
Look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best Regards,
Jessica [surname removed for privacy, even though I’m sure it’s not their real name..!] | Business Developmnt
So let’s look, in some more details, at the issues they say the site has…
Title Tag: The title is 126 characters long. The title should not exceed 80 characters. – The current title tag is 126 characters long. The recommendation from Google is that about 80 is about as long as you should go. However, the length shown [on search engines] is now normally based on the size of the screen (maxing out on 600px with Google) so I’m actually happy with what I’ve got and this error isn’t actually applicable to my site (and being longer won’t actually hurt you, it’s just that not all of it will be displayed)…
The Text to HTML ratio is 10.14 %: – ‘Text to HTML Ratio’ is about how much ‘real text’ there is on a page. Some people also call having not much text ‘thin content’. Having lots of content is normally a good thing! However, in this case although it’s the home page of the site, it’s actually one of the least entered pages via search engines. The site has LOTS of pages about Christmas, and that’s how most the vast majority of people actually enter the site using search engines – like going straight into the page about The Christmas Story (Which is #1 on all of Google for ‘the christmas story’ out of several hundreds of million of results!!!). So again, not actually applicable in my case.
W3C Markup Validation: Status: FAILED [1 errors, 0 warning] – This is WRONG! My site has no HTML errors! (Unlike their site which has multiple errors and warnings…)
Google Page Speed score: 49% (Low) – This is WRONG! It gets 100/100 for desktop and 98/100 for mobile on Google Page Speed.
Favicon: No hi-resolution (192×192) icon found. – Again, this is WRONG! The site has favicons (the little pictures for sites you see in the www bar on browsers and in some search results) of all the needed and relevant sizes. (Their site only has the default favicon, no extra ones…)
Keyword consistency is not good. – I’m not actually sure what they mean by this! The site is about Christmas. The words Christmas appears 14 times on the home page…! So I’ll also say this is WRONG! [I’d also really like to know what keywords aren’t consistent as they don’t know anything about what keywords the site is targeting!]
We found a total of 51 links out of which 5 are duplicate links. – True but not an SEO issue, so irrelevant!
IP Canonicalization: No, your site’s IP 104.24.102.73 does not redirect to whychristmas.com. – This is an old SEO myth which says you need to have a ‘dedicated IP address’ (which costs you quite a bit!) to stop a site being associated with other ‘bad sites’ which might be on the same server: https://www.seoblog.com/2017/09/dedicated-address-improve-rankings/ My Christmas site uses a service called CloudFlare for extra speed and security. That IP belongs to CloudFlare (which you would think an ‘experienced digital marketing agency’ would be able to find out – it takes about 30 seconds to learn that…)
So out of their eight errors, four are simply wrong, three are irrelevant and one is an old SEO myth!
In their $299 a month package, one of the things Jessica said they would do is “Google Plus Business Page Setup” – only Google+ closed several months ago! It’s almost like they don’t actually know what they’re doing…
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.runexesolutions.com/
For HTML Validation, their site has 2 errors & 9 warnings. My site has no errors or warnings!
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 71/100
Mobile: 45/100
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 (66%) / D (63%)
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 98% / A (90%) – so again much better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 13 errors and 51 alerts that’s REALLY not good… My site has no errors or warnings!
Their site takes over 4.2 seconds to load – my site takes less than 1/2 second to load – so it’s over 8x faster!
They DO NOT have any privacy policy on the site. They also track full IPs of site visitors but don’t tell you (this is illegal under GDPR).
There’s also several bad code practices. Their main logo has the tag ‘logo image’. That’s terrible – it should ‘Runexe Solutions’. Their main ‘meta tags’ are configured wrongly. They have several <H1> tags one their home page; best practice is to have one with other sub headings tags as appropriate. They also don’t have any ‘OpenGraph’ tags in the code (which search engines and places like Facebook can use to display information about your site) which of course my site does!
In the 2nd Jessica’s email, she said “Let me give you a quick introduction about Runexesolutions. It is a leading digital marketing agency with over 5 years of experience having a database of more than 3000+ clients.” BUT… their domain was only registered in March 2018!!! (So less than 15 months ago…)
Jessica also said “Our headquarters are in Miami, Florida however; our delivery center is in India.” BUT… on their site, there’s no address in the USA listed (only two in India) and the US phone number on their site (the same number was also at the bottom of Jessica’s email) has an area code for the Bronx in New York (and a Google of that area code shows it’s used by lots of scammers for forwarder numbers…). This, together with the odd domain forwarding and registration in India of the domain the first Jessica was using; and the fact that the 2nd Jessica emailed me at 7.41am UK time (which is 2.41am in Miami but 11.31am in India) leads me to think that they might not be based in the USA after all… I have nothing against web companies based in India. However, I don’t like it when companies aren’t truthful about things!
Conclusion
I always find it rather disconcerting when companies use a fake domain to spam you (and this one is especially odd in that it forwards to yet another SEO company!), rather than using their actual company name.
I also find it very worrying when all of their recommendations are either wrong or meaningless, their site has HTML and accessibility errors; bad code practices, that they are use old SEO myths as scare tactics and that they seem to be lying about the age of their company!
So if you get an email from a digitalmarketingline.com or runexesolutions.com email address, ignoring and deleting might be a good option.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.
UPDATE: Jessica Roy first spammed me on Wed, 5th June. She’s just spammed me again [Sat, 8th June] for my Christmas site even though I replied to her the first time! So that’s two lots of spam within four days. That’s some impressively terrible spamming!!!
UPDATE 2: [19th June 2019] I’ve just posted about Zentryx Tech Solutions who also initially made contact via digitalmarketingline.com! And rather amazingly they also seem to be office neighbours with Runexe! Zentryx’s address is “DCB 322, 3rd Floor, DLF Cybercity, Bhubaneswar…” and Runexe are at “DCB 312, 3rd Floor, DLF Cybercity, Bhubaneswar…” – hmmmmmm
UPDATE 3: [3rd September] Runexe are now also using @ethicalmarketingonline.com for their initial spam contact emails (‘ethical’ – now that’s a laugh…). So if you get an email from that domain – you have been warned!!!