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 is the ‘longest’ time that SEO spam has taken, as we’ll find out below. The initial spam email came from a ‘Dora’ who was using @gmail.com email with some numbers in it, although subsequent replies came from Shaan who was using an @indeedseo.com email address.
Here’s the initial email from Dora:
Greetings!
Please stay at home, Please be safe, Don’t try to be a super hero, No-one is immune of this disease, Your health and your family’s health is more important
My name is Dora, Marketing Manager for a Digital marketing company based in India. We offer following services with suitable price.
SEO – (To improve your website ranking).
SMM – (Social marketing for your business).
PPC – (To run an advertising campaign on your website).
We have the expertise to send hundreds, or even thousands, of customers to your website. Give us an opportunity to serve you. I assure you would like our solution and services
If you are interested let’s hop on a quick Skype call. I am sure you will love us (100% sure).Please reply to this email with you Skype or Phone number.
Kinds Regards,
Dora
Business Development Executive
This email arrived towards the end of April 2020 and it’s yet another SEO spammer using the global medical pandemic and ‘concern’ about it in their spam, blllleeeeh…
Anyway, I replied to Dora asking them to look at my Christmas site (www.whychristmas.com).
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 first reply from Shaan (five days later):
Hello James,
Thanks for writing to us!My name is Ranjit, Working as a Business Development Manager in IndeedSEO. We are happy to receive your inquiry from one of our marketing executive Dora Schmidt & We are proud to welcome you in indeedseo & Look forward to many years of working together.
IndeedSEO is a service brand & one of eminent Digital Marketing Company.
We provide white label SEO/Digital Marketing Services worldwide. We have more than 10+ years of experience in listed services.
Ø Search Engine Optimization
Ø Social Media Marketing
Ø PPC Campaign Management
Ø Online Reputation Management
Ø Link Building
Ø Content Writing
Ø Content Marketing
We have quickly gone through your website https://seospam.xyz & we found currently your website is lacking in quality SEO – e.g. Proper Tags Optimization, On-Off Site Optimization & SMO etc. Firstly we need to make the website completely SEO friendly by following quality SEO changes as per Google SEO guidelines or algo.
We assure you we can deliver you the Quality & 100% Guaranteed results in terms of top ranking (page #1) on Google & traffic. Which further generates inquiries/leads for you and helps to grow your business online.
Here find our monthly pricing & package for SEO services. Please have a look & let me know your thoughts to proceed further so that I could send you a detailed proposal for your website soon.
If you have any other queries for me, please feel free to ask, I would be happy to assist you more.
We are available 24*7 on Call USA: +1 210 880 4844 , Whatsapp : +91 98781-02900 & Skype : indeedseo
Look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Regards,
Shaan S
Business ManagerSales | IndeedSEO
So it’s come from Shann, but in the obviously copied and pasted email, it says that it’s been sent by Ranjit! AND they’d also failed to answer any of my questions, it was just standard marketing (spamming!) blurb…
There was then another email with their prices/services attached in a badly formatted Excel spreadsheet…
So I replied asking a couple of questions…
Hi Ranjit (or is it Shaan?!)
Thanks for your email and price list.
I see you’ve been through my website (jpc-design.com) but I asked Dora about another site (https://www.whychristmas.com). Perhaps something got lost in the emails!
Please can you explain more about what you mean by ‘Proper Tags Optimization, On-Off Site Optimization & SMO etc’? What ‘exactly’ is wrong?
Thanks,
James
And here’s Shann’s reply:
Hello James,
Yes i am shaan here, ranjit is also in our marketing team & he must contact you regarding the same, but this time i am approaching you, now Proper Tags Optimization, On-Off Site Optimization & SMO etc means your website need to be optimized according to google and make it more seo or user friendly.
If you know little bit about seo then you must be familiar with it. Now please let me know if you are interested in our seo or digital marketing services. If not then please simply reply with NO so that i could not bother you again.
Regards,
Shaan
Business Manager
Hmmm, Shaan does his best to cover up the name mistake but it’s not very convincing! But they’d still not answered my questions, so I asked again! (I don’t think it’s un-reasonable to ask questions if you’re going to pay someone for a service…)
Hi Shaan!
Yes, I do know a bit about SEO. But you haven’t not answered my question. If I’m going to pay you any money, I’d like to know what you would change and why!
What’s ‘wrong’ with the current tags, etc? If, according to you, they need to be optimised, then they can’t be ‘right’…
Surely this is a fairly simple question which a leading SEO company should be able to answer easily for any potential client?
Thanks,
James
There was no answer for a few days, so I sent a quick email asking if they’d had a chance to look at my email… and SEVEN WEEKS LATER I got a reply!!! I honestly given up expecting a reply… (I know we’re emailing at an odd time for many businesses, but they were happy to spam using the pandemic as a way of marketing, so I really don’t have much sympathy). Anyway, here’s the long awaited reply:
Hello James,
Greetings!!!
Apologies for the late response,
Yes, I can explain to you the tag optimization, as I can see your website doesn’t have an ideal length of Meta Titles; it should not be more than 70 Characters according to Google and I can’t find Google Analytics code as well. So We need to re-optimize the pages titles, descriptions, Tracking code.
On-Page is all about the website’s technical errors and content optimization. Meta Tags, Tacking Code Placement, Noindex tags checking, Internal linking settings, Duplicate Content checking, and SEO Friendly content placement.
About Off-Page, Promotion of your website on various another third party high authoritative websites to improve the web presence of the business website.
When we talk about social media, it’s about optimization of Fb, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube with well-searched hashtags + branded tags. So we can engage a relevant audience through our posts.
Please let me know if you have more questions or queries.
Regards,
Shaan
Finally some answers, but they’re still not very clear about what’s really ‘wrong’ with my site to need their services!
Their Report & Recommendations
So let’s have a look at their limited answers in their email…
…your website doesn’t have an ideal length of Meta Titles; it should not be more than 70 Characters according to Google
Hmmm, it’s actually 60 and not 70 characters which are ‘recommended’ by Google (you’d think that the ‘Top SEO Company in India’ as they call themselves would know that…). Anyway, yes some are a bit long (mainly because words like ‘Christmas’ are quite long!). However, there are lots of good keywords in the first 60 characters of all my meta titles! (e.g. my home page’s title is 104 characters long – but the word Christmas is in the first 60 characters three times!). The length is primarily what’s shown on search results, so ideally you want all of that to ‘show’, but being a bit long doesn’t really ‘hurt’ you as such…
and I can’t find Google Analytics code as well.
Yes, I don’t have Google Analytics on my site. I used to, but now I use a different, server based, analytics tool. There are a couple of reasons for this. The UK Government has updated its advice about how tracking cookies can be used on sites and this affects things like Google Analytics. I don’t want visitors to my site to have an annoying pop-up and I like privacy, so I’m happy to now use a non tracking system… And not having Google Analytics installed WILL NOT directly affect SEO on a site.
So We need to re-optimize the pages titles, descriptions, Tracking code.
Well no, they don’t!
As we’ll see below they have MAJOR issues with their own site; there’s no way I’d let them anywhere near my site. (Oh and they don’t seem to know about optimising meta items either..)
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.indeedseo.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 201 errors and 13 warnings. THAT IS REALLY TERRIBLE!!!
In fact their site is riddled with basic coding errors. Considering that they offer ‘HTML Code Optimisation’ as something you get with any of their packages, it’s a real shame that they’ve not actually bothered to do it on their own site (or do they actually know how to do it…?)
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 75/100 (that’s decent…)
Mobile: 11/100 (that’s REALLY 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 28 errors and 23 contrast errors. My site has no errors of either kind! They don’t seem to know what image ‘alt’ text is…
The alt on their logo is ‘Logo’. THAT’S TERRIBLE! It should be ‘IndeedSEO’
You know they said my meta tags need help… Well. They have TWO meta ‘titles’ on their home page – you only ever want one – that’s a VERY BASIC error. Their home page meta ‘description’ is 239 characters long. The ‘recommended’ length for descriptions is 160. So they really to take their own advice – oh dear. (The description on my Christmas site’s home page is 157 characters – boom!)
They still have a link to Google+ in their site’s footer. But Google+ closed well over a year ago. You have thought that the “top SEO company in India” (remember, that’s what they claim to be) would know about G+ closing and would have removed a debunked link wouldn’t you?! (It’s amazing that just about every spammy SEO company says they’re the ‘top/number 1 SEO company’; it’s almost like they’re not truthful or something…)
They have a next to useless privacy policy. There’s no mention of any of the multitude of tracking cookies and scripts used on their site. (So this is probably actually in breach of GDPR.)
On their ‘Case Studies’ page, the third item is for an ‘escort agency’ in Hong Kong and it features a very NSFW photo!!! (I mean REALLY?!)
In their services spreadsheet they sent to me, it says that they offer ‘Web 2.0 (800-1000 Words) Submission’ and ‘Web 3.0 Sites Backlinks’. Both of these are completely meaningless!
Web 2.0 and 3.0 are geeky terms sometimes used for about ‘interactive’ tech used on the web. (They are very broad terms with a huge range of definitions. Roughly Web 2.0 started when it became easy to leave things like comments on sites and Web 3.0 are sites like Facebook and Youtube where the users ‘create’ the content.)
By ‘Web 2.0 (800-1000 Words) Submission’, I’m guessing they actually mean submitting content on places like hubpages/squidoo OR they could mean placing comment spam on blogs, where they will ‘advertise’ your site – that is not good!
And I honestly have no idea what ‘Web 3.0 Sites Backlinks’ could actually be! (If you Google “Web 3.0 Sites Backlinks” you get precisely 0 results.) I’m guessing they do just mean normal backlinks but have put ‘Web 3.0’ in front if it to make it sound more fancy… OR it could mean comment spam on sites like YouTube/Facebook with things linking back to your site – again this is not good!
So all in all, it’s very un-impressive!
Conclusion
IndeedSEO are yet another SEO spammer who are hiding behind generic accounts to spam people.
They aren’t practising what they’re preach in terms of their own SEO ‘optimisation’ (let alone being the ‘top SEO Company in India’).
And they also don’t seem to know how to set-up a site properly as they’ve got several very basic things wrong and their site is appallingly slow on mobiles…
So if IndeedSEO want to ‘help’ with your site, I’d hit that delete button.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.