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 ‘Loren’ who was using a very random @gmail.com email, although subsequent replies came from Sumit from who was then using a @globalhunttechnologies.com email address.
Here’s the initial email from Loren:
Want to be #1 on Google search engines?
Do you want that your website to sells for you?
Don’t leave a chance that your website sales of your services, we can get your business on the top of search engines Google !
Let’s get started and ask for free website detailed analysis and no obligation quote.
Regards,
Loren
(SEO Consultant)
Ps – I will be happy to send you “Full Proposal” and “Pricing” and “company portfolio “furthers more.
So, I replied to Loren asking them to look at my Christmas site (www.whychristmas.com), looking at it ‘world wide’ and with the keywords ‘Christmas Traditions’ (which it’s normally #1 on Google for already!).
During each December my Christmas site 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’…
Here’s the reply from Sumit:
Hi James
I wish you are doing well.
I am Sumit from Globalhunt technologies (https://www.globalhunttechnologies.com/).
This mail is in reference to the conversation that you have with my colleague Loren. I am attaching your response to the last mail of Loren at the end of my mail.
As per your response in the mail, I am sharing your website analysis report and our SEO packages with you:
SEO packages:
Our Starting package:
Cost: 150 USD per month
Keywords: 15
Duration: 3 to 4 monthsFeatures of the package:
1. Result oriented.
2. ROI assured.
3. Fully customized as per the client’s business.
4. No long term investment, On a monthly basis.
Benefits that you get in that package:
1. Keywords analysis report.
2. Competitor analysis report.
3. Technical analysis for the website.
4. Continuous monitoring of website performance.
I would like to introduce to you about our work process:
First, we fix all the structural and technical errors on your website to make it more SEO friendly so that Google can easily crawl through it.After fixing all the errors we do keyword analysis for your website on the basis of different important criteria like competitor analysis, your business type, Search competition.
After the keyword analysis, we promote your website on different blogs with targeted keywords to increase the credibility of the website on Google.Please have a look at our clients’ SEO results [link removed]
Please feel free to ask your queries, I would like to answer these questions.
Please find the attached analysis report for the website.
You can connect with me on Skype: [removed for privacy] or can reach me over the phone: [removed for privacy]
Looking forward to working with you.
Thanks & Regards
Sumit K [Name removed for privacy]
[Then there was the email footer with lots of contact which I won’t put here…]
As well as the email, there was a PDF attachment of their ‘Website Analysis Report’.
Their Report & Recommendations
So let’s have a look at the ‘Website Analysis Report’ PDF…
It consisted of 10 pages broken into sections with a number of items in each ‘On Site Factors’ (nine items), ‘On Page Factors’ (15 items) and ‘Off Page Factors’ (three items) followed by their ‘Recommendations’, ‘Observations and Suggestions for Search Engine Optimization’ (20 items), ‘Social Media Network Analysis’ (five items) and ‘Local Business – Search Engine Optimization’ (three items).
The PDF is full of basic spelling and grammatical errors.
I won’t go through ‘all’ the items, just the ones they say are ‘Not Good’ or that ‘I should do’.
On site blog setup (in the ‘On Site Factors’)
Yes, having a blog can be a really good way of helping Google like your site and bringing people onto your site. However, I don’t need (or want) one on a Christmas information site (which I think they could have seen…) So I’ll say this is NOT APPLICABLE.
Page Rank (PR) (in the ‘On Page Factors’)
They say my Page Rank is 4 and that having it higher would be good. However, they don’t say what Page Rank really is OR how to make it higher! But there’s a big problem with that number. Although ‘PageRank’ is still part of Google’s algorithm, being able to ‘see’ a page’s rank ‘number’ was stopped in 2016 – so giving it a number of ‘4’ is completely MEANINGLESS and MISLEADING – yet dodgy SEO companies still seem to use it… (They also list the site’s ‘Page Authority’ and ‘Domain Authority’ numbers – 65 and 53 and have these as ‘Good’. Now these numbers are actually worth using and can still be ‘got’.)
Meta Title – Need to Optimize: (in the ‘On Page Factors’)
This is WRONG. All the Meta titles on my site are very optimized. It’s funny how all SEO companies seem to want to change these by default!
Meta Description – Need to Optimize: (in the ‘On Page Factors’)
See above!
Broken Links (in the ‘On Page Factors’)
They say there are nine broken links. I check all the links from the site a few times a year. I’ve just run a check and found four. None of these were ‘internal’ broken links (the worse kind). One was a ‘timeout’ rather than a ‘true’ broken link. I’ve fixed/removed the links now. So this was sort of correct (although they got the number very wrong!).
HTML Validation (in the ‘On Page Factors’)
They say there’s 1 warning and 2 errors. They don’t say what page(s) these were supposedly on. There are NONE on the home page (unlike their site – more on that below). I am VERY picky about HTML validation (which is more than they seem to be…) So this is WRONG.
Link Popularity (in the ‘Off Page Factors’)
They say I’ve got 95 backlinks from 127 for Bing. Both of these numbers are utter rubbish. Using the links report from within Google Search Tools (which they would not have access to for my site) it says there are 62,498 backlinks! And using a leading general backlinks checker it says there are 113,864 backlinks (using this tool, their site has 6,390)! So this is just WRONG.
Everything in their ‘Recommendations’ are so general they’d work with any site. I suspect this section is just repeated on all their reports…
The ‘Observations and Suggestions for Search Engine Optimization’ section seems to be some of the exact same generic ‘Recommendations’ as in the above section with some other bits thrown in… But some things that I should do (apparently) are:
Content Optimization and Keyword Proximity & Frequency
They say I need to improve these. I suspect they say this in all of their reports… No I don’t, the site VERY keyword rich. This is WRONG.
Geo Meta Tags
They say I need to add geo meta tags. There are generic ‘English’ ones because the site uses the English language. The site is a generic ‘global’ one and therefore doesn’t need ‘local’ geo tags. This is NOT APPLICABLE. (And of course their site doesn’t have ANY geo tags – not even a basic language tag…)
Cache – Update your web page on regular basis for the fast cache of the website.
This is just weird. How often you update a site has NOTHING TO DO with how a site’s cache works! This WRONG and MISLEADING.
Sitemap.html (For User)
They say it doesn’t exist. It does. It’s linked in the footer ON EVERY PAGE – yet they somehow missed it. This is WRONG.
Webmaster
By ‘just ‘Webmaster’, I take it they mean the Google and Bing Search Console (which were called ‘Webmaster tools several years ago)… They say I need to add them. They are already added – just not using a ‘code’ method. So this is WRONG.
ROR Sitemap
They say my site needs a ‘ROR sitemap’. These were a kind of sitemap before the XML ones which we use came into effect. ROR never took off and they haven’t been of any use whatsoever for at least TEN YEARS. So why on earth is an SEO company recommending one now (apart from them being able to charge for creating something which is useless…)?!
In the ‘Social Media Network Analysis’ they say the site hasn’t got a LinkedIn or Instagram account. Both of these are correct. However, my site isn’t a business, so why would it be on LinkedIn and I don’t use Instagram!
In the final ‘Local Business’ they say the site isn’t listed on Google, Bing or Yelp ‘business places’. There’s a very good reason for this. IT’S NOT A BUSINESS with an address. This is very obvious if you’ve actually ever bothered to visit the site and look at it properly!
So out of all those items, the only sort of correct thing are that there are four broken links on the site (which I’ve now fixed!) All the rest of the items were wrong, not applicable, out dated information or misleading…
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.globalhunttechnologies.com
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 79 errors and 21 warnings. (That’s really not good! Considering that they have HTML validation as ones of the ‘On Page Factors’ in their report, you would have thought that they might have actually looked at it for their own site – but it seems not!)
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 62/100 (that’s ok-ish…)
Mobile: 21/100 (that is not good…)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 99/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 154 errors and 82 contrast errors. My site has no errors of either kind! They don’t seem to know what image ‘alt’ text is or how any sort of accessibility works on a site…
They have fifteen ‘Heading 1’ tags on their home page. You should really only have 1!
They do actually have a half decent privacy policy, which is a novelty for SEO spammers…
They list two addresses on their site. An address in Noida, India (which is their real address) and one in the USA (which isn’t!). The US address is in Alpharetta, Georgia – but it’s a residential address on the very northern suburbs of Atlanta. Their US phone number is for central Florida near Orlando. It’s normally used for cell/mobile numbers (the 321 part comes from the area being where Cape Canaveral is, where many US space missions are launched!)
They have a listing on TrustPilot and have 11 4 or 5 star reviews. Yet ALL of their 11 reviewers have only left 1 review – that is VERY unusual… (and somewhat suspicious)
On their testimonials page, there have some quotes and photos from happy customers. Only some of the people really aren’t who Global Hunt say they are…
There’s a ‘Morgan James’ from the USA, only a reverse image search shows that she seems to be a designer called Hope Candieas, who’s a graphic and fashion designer from the US! (Her photo is also used on many PDFs on ‘issue’ under the name ‘Zara David’ from India. This couldn’t be Global Hunt making up a fake name to create spammy PDFs for backlinks could it?!)
There’s a ‘Martin Alan’ from the UK, but he’s actually Frank Ocean, a US singer/songwriter!
Some of the testimonials might be truthful, but I know that at least two of them aren’t!
Conclusion
Sunrise Grow Web Solutions are yet another SEO spammer who are hiding behind generic accounts to spam people.
Their report is full or errors and misinformation.
They aren’t practising what they’re preach in terms of their own SEO ‘optimisation’.
And they also don’t seem to know how to set-up a site properly…
So if Sunrise Grow Web Solutions want to help with your site, I’d give it a miss.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.