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 first email came from a Shawn who was using an outlook.com email (supposedly for ‘SKS Business Services’), although a subsequent replies have come from Himanshu using an ogrelogic.com email address.
Here’s the initial email from Shawn:
Hello,
Hope you are doing well there.
I am affiliated with a SEO company that has helped over 800 businesses achieve 1st page listing on Google search result page for highly competitive keywords.
The right solution would be to get your website Search Engine Optimized for there’s a simple equation that works in the online world:
Targeted SEO -> Qualified Traffic -> Higher Sales and ROI
Let me know if you are interested, then I can send you our SEO Packages and Price list.
Warm Regards
Shawn Bray
Online Marketing Executive
I replied to Shawn and I got a reply from Himanshu.
Hi James,
I hope this email finds you in best of Spirits!
I’m Himanshu Saxena involved in New business development and Post account management engagements with OgreLogic Solutions, an IT Solutions company based in Austin, Texas. We have our offshore delivery centers across the globe.
My business research team came across your website and believe that we could join hands in corporate synergy and have an intelligent business conversation. Do have a look at our website: http://www.ogrelogic.com to know our story.
Kindly let me know if you have 15-20 minutes open timeslots for tomorrow or Monday, so that we can schedule a short call and brief you about us and we may also share some of the interesting work we are doing.
Have a nice weekend ahead!
Thanks,
Himanshu [surname removed for privacy] | Manager – Business Development
I replied to Himanshu saying that I couldn’t do a call, but would be interested in seeing their recommendations… and this is the email I got back from Himanshu (the email had two, badly sized, images/screen grabs embedded in it, which I’ve included for your enjoyment!):
Hi James,
Thanks for your reply, I hope you had a fantastic weekend!
As per my discussion with our execution team, we have analyzed your company website i.e. https://seospam.xyz/ initially and found your company website is not search engine friendly because it doesn’t full fill the guideline of search engine like Google, msn, yahoo. Which directly impact on the visibility of your website that means you are losing the prospective customers. They are going to your competitors. Kindly go through the initial analysis report below:
Also, There are other reasons as well why your business is not growing as it is supposed to. Kindly go through with the current ranking of the keywords below:
We take immense pride in having helped all our clients reach page 1 ranking in Google. All our strategists are certified and continuously updated on the changing algorithms of Google
Hence, the results we accomplish for our clients are unprecedented. We will bring your company website on the 1st page of the Google or top 10 ranking within 3 – 6 months by doing SEO for your company website at a very competitive rate.
Let me know if you have any query.
Thanks,
Himanshu [surname removed for privacy]
Manager – Business Development
Their Report & Recommendations
Well, that’s about a short a ‘report’ I’ve ever seen from an SEO spammer; and it’s also managed to be about the useless as well!
The first ‘initial analysis report’ is a very badly edited screenshot from GTmetrix – a FREE site that does some automated tests for a range of site speed and SEO factors. GTmetrix gives you two ‘scores’ based on the SEO/speed tools from Google and Yahoo. (I use GTMetrix as it’s a good basic tools for getting a broad overview of a site’s performance. However, solely using it as your main, and only, ‘audit tool’ is very poor indeed.)
As you can see, the scores for my site are 95% and 86% – that’s pretty good!!! But according to OrgeLogic somehow my site “is not search engine friendly because it doesn’t full fill the guideline of search engine like Google, msn, yahoo” (well, MSN became Bing several years ago but never mind…) The screenshot also gives a page size and loading time for the site (GTmetrix tends to give slower loading times for sites than other page testers I’ve found).
As we’ll see below. My site has better scores and loads A LOT faster than their own site…!
The other image is a list of keywords that they seem to think I should be ranking for. Well it’s a bit of an odd selection of words seemingly taken from the home page of my site; and if they appear in they appear in the meta ‘title’ and ‘description’ tags and in a ‘heading tag’ on the page. (Although that’s not explained by Himanshu. I can work that out because it’s my job. But for most of my clients that chart would be pretty meaningless.)
Let’s look at the words and see what relevance they have for me as a web designer in Minehead:
- about (yes, there’s an about link but why would I be trying to rank for ‘about’?!)
- blog (see ‘about!’)
- contact (see ‘about’!)
- exmoor (I live in Somerset and have a couple of clients with ‘Exmoor’ in their name and they’re listed on the page – but I don’t really expect to rank for ‘Exmoor’ as such as people are less likely to be searching for that in regard to web design…)
- minehead (it’s where I live, I do want to rank for web design in Minehead and guess what – I’m on the first page of Google for that!)
- west (I live in ‘West Somerset’ but west on its own is really rather meaningless)
- chant (that’s the surname of one of my clients – I don’t want to rank for that though…)
- holiday (I have some holiday cottage and b&b sites as clients – I don’t want to rank for that though…)
- charity (I have quite a few charity clients – I don’t want to rank for that though…)
- sites (I make web sites – see ‘minehead’!)
- baptist (I have a few Baptist Churches as clients – I don’t want to rank for that though…)
- home (see ‘about’!)
- mariposa (this is the name of a charity that I manage all the sites for – I don’t want to rank for that though…)
- menu (see ‘about’!)
- design (see ‘sites’!)
So out of those 15 keywords, three (maybe four) are relevant to me having a web design business in Minehead. And if you do a search for ‘web design minehead’, I’m on the first page!!!
The rest of the email is business and marketing speak… They also say that they get you a first page/top ten ranking (which I’ve already got!) within 3.6 months [and the initial spam email had the subject “1st page listing !!”]. But remember…
So overall the report is basically completely useless! Their ‘audit’ is a screenshot from a free site which shows that my site is really very good (95%!!!); and their keywords are hopeless for my business and site. They don’t actually ever say specifically anything ‘wrong’ with my site or what they would do to improve my ranking…
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://ogrelogic.com/
As they used GTmetrix for their ‘report’, let’s do the same for their site!
Remember, my site gets 95% and 86%. So my site is 12% and 16% better on the respective scores! Also, according to GTmetrix, my site is 424kb is size and takes 2.7 secs to load. That makes my site 16x smaller than their one and my site loads 10x quicker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So if OrgeLogic are using that as their main site assessment tool, I’d say that their site needs some work…
And I actually would say their site needs some work! It’s got several HTML validation errors and well as some HUGE accessibility issues. There is a ‘Privacy Policy’ link on their site, only you can’t view it because their site isn’t set-up correctly and that page won’t actually load!
But all of that is not what worries me about OrgeLogic the most…
On Himanshu’s first email he said that OrgeLogic is based in Austin Texas. However, the Austin address on their website is for the “Austin Suites Center” which specialises in ‘virtual offices’!
They also list their ‘head office’ in New York. But the address they give is a very normal looking house in the middle of a residential area in the suburbs of New York!
Their ‘offshore delivery center’ is given as an address in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India (which is suburb of New Delhi). And sure enough, that’s an office block.
The phone number on their site is indeed an Austin one, but it also appears to be in an area code that’s used for a lot of VOIP (phone over the internet) and forwarding numbers – which would fit with the ‘virtual office’ of their ‘main’ address!
On Himanshu’s emails, he had a different phone number. This one has the area code for San Jose, California – and this time the area code seems to be used by lots of phone spammers…
Himanshu also gave a mobile/cell number on his email (and interesting he calls it a ‘mobile’ which you would call it in India, not ‘cell’ as it would be called in the USA!). This one has an area code for San Fransisco and again is an area code used by phone spammers…
On the about page on the site, it gives the names of the two founders of OrgeLogic. If I Google their co-founder and CEO, Manan Vashisht, it comes up with his own blog and Twitter profile. Both make it very clear that Manan is Indian and based 100% in India [in New Delhi…] (and a Google of ‘Himanshu Saxena SEO’ also shows that Himanshu is based 100% in India [also in New Delhi…])!
All of this leads me to think that OrgeLogic have NO premises in the USA whatsoever and are yet another SEO company lying about where they are really situated… (There’s also a review of the company on an employment site stating that there’s no Austin office and that the company lies to all its clients and its own staff! https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Ogrelogic-RVW13850366.htm)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have no issues with Indian based web companies; but I do have issues with any company that flat out lies!
Conclusion
Yet again, a spammy SEO company is using a ‘random’ email from for their initial spamming.
Yet again, a spammy SEO company has a completely worthless report.
Yet again, a spammy SEO company says a site is terrible for SEO, when it’s A LOT better than their own site.
And yet again, a spammy SEO company seems to be lying about where they are based to make themselves look bigger and more important.
So if you get an email from a random @outlook.com address saying they can help; or from OrgeLogic themselves, then I would think very seriously about hitting that delete button as soon as I could.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.