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…
The initial spam email came from a ‘Simran’ who was using @gmail.com email with lots of numbers in it (never a good sign…), although subsequent replies came from ‘Sam’ who was using an @digitalmediafox.com email address.
Here’s the initial email from Simran:
Hi Sir/Ma’am,
Hope you are well,
We offer Search Engine Optimization service to improve your website ranking in search engines like: Google, Yahoo and Bing.
If you would like to improve your business, ranking, traffic and visitors through search engines then check out our services.
We are SEO experts and we can help you get your website on the First Page of Search Engine. We work on (Google, Yahoo and Bing).
We will also be Promoting & maintain your all social media Account like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube & My Space, Marketing, Etc
If you are interested, then I can send you our Price Packages, past work details, company information and an affordable quotation with the best offer.
Kindly share your detailed requirement with working contact detail like Phone number/WhatsApp number/Skype Id for further discussion.
I look forward to your positive response.
Thanks & Regards,
Simran,
Online Marketing Consultant INDIA
This email arrived into my [email protected] email, yet they’re not sure if I’m a Sir or a Madam. Oh well, not a good start…
Anyway, I replied to Simran 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 reply from Sam:
Hello James,
Thanks for your reply with the requirement for website designing & development.
My name is Sam, Simran’s colleague working as Business Development Manager with Digital Media Fox (www.digitalmediafox.com). We are headquartered in the New Delhi-NCR, India.
We have our partners across the globe over the USA, UK, and Australia.
In context to your trailing email, I have checked and analyzing your website (www.whychristmas.com) from each corner and there are few things that need to be done to give it an elegant look and user-friendly CMS.
I am sharing some of the points in prospects to designing of the website, please have a look:-
Ø Home page renovation work
Ø Header and Footer Management: Need to add to make it more elegant
Ø Logo should be implemented
Ø Content font should be fixed
Ø UI for all the inner pages should be fixed
Ø Map should be added at the bottom of the website
Ø Social media icons should be renovated
Ø The images should be purchased one not with a watermark of “Flickr”.
Ø Website will be dynamic (to make the edits on the website)
Ø Website will be Mobile friendly and cross-browser compatible
Ø Website will be SEO friendly
I would like to arrange a call to discuss your requirement and suggest you the best option to start the work, please share the best suitable time so that we can arrange a call accordingly.
If you have any queries or doubts please feel free to contact me anytime.
Looking forward to hearing back from you soon.
Their Report & Recommendations
So let’s have a look at their ‘points’ that they think need sorting on my Christmas website…
Home page renovation work
I’m not sure what this means. The home page of the site is designed to be a glorified landing page. It does this job rather well. To me, ‘Home page renovation work’ sounds like a generic statement they can put on every email, simply so they can ‘do something’.
Header and Footer Management: Need to add to make it more elegant
Again, I’m not sure what this means. The header and footer have everything they need in them. This sounds like another ‘do something’ phrase.
Logo should be implemented
There’s already a logo. It’s on every page on the site. He’s a Christmas Tree called ‘Bruce The Spruce’!
Content font should be fixed
This simply doesn’t make sense. The content font is fine. It’s a font called Oxygen. It’s a very popular and widely used font!
UI for all the inner pages should be fixed
Hmmmm, ok. Well this is a matter of taste. I like how the UI on the inner pages works. There’s the ‘submenu’ for that section on the left and the content on the right. It’s nice and easy to use. I’ve had people tell me that many times!
Map should be added at the bottom of the website
NO. The site is about Christmas information. It IS NOT a business with a location. Having a map would be completely pointless. I would have thought this would be perfectly obvious if someone had actually bothered to properly look at the site.
Social media icons should be renovated
Errrm why? All the icons are the current ones for the various platforms. They’re the current logos. They’re also SVG icons, so they’re small, load really quickly and scale across devices without losing quality.
The images should be purchased one not with a watermark of “Flickr”.
I do use several images from Flickr on my site. There’s a very good reason for this: most of them are photos of Christmas celebrations from different countries and cultures and these types of photos generally aren’t available on stock sites! The photos I’ve used from Flickr have been uploaded by people who have allowed them to be used on non-commercial sites – like mine. Without using a source like Flickr, it would be VERY different to find many of the photo subjects and the photos really help people to know how Christmas is celebrated around the world!
Website will be dynamic (to make the edits on the website)
It doesn’t need to be. I’m the only person who needs to make any updates. I’m happy to do this in ‘raw’ HTML code. This also means that this site is ‘static’ which can make it load faster and use less server resources (useful for a site like mine when it gets viewed millions of times a month…). I often use ‘dynamic’ sites (like this one is!) for my clients when people need to be able to easily update things. Also their own site is currently not ‘dynamic’… hmmmm
Website will be Mobile friendly and cross-browser compatible
It already is. VERY.
Website will be SEO friendly
It already is. VERY.
So none of those points are actually valid. (Well the UI one is down to taste but…)
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 http://digitalmediafox.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 2 errors which is the best I’ve ever seen for a SEO spammer! However, one of those errors is fairly fundamental when it comes to SEO – they don’t have any ‘alt’ text on their logo…
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 83/100 (that’s pretty good…)
Mobile: 76/100 (that’s also pretty good…)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 99/100 – so both better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 8 errors and 19 contrast errors. My site has no errors of either kind!
As I said above, they don’t have any alt text on their logo. This is bad for accessibility and also SEO.
What’s also TERRIBLE for SEO is that they don’t have a meta description. That’s one of the most simple and fundamental parts of SEO. Their home page meta title is just “Digital Media Fox | Home” again that’s pretty terrible. You’d have thought that a company who spams people about how their sites need SEO help, would know how to do the very basics on their own site – but apparently not.
Their site doesn’t use HTTPS/SSL (having the padlock next to the www bit). This is pretty standard these days and not having it really does not inspire confidence…
There’s a ‘Terms & Policy’ link in the footer but it doesn’t go anywhere! (And I’m not sure what ‘policy’ it would be for if it did go anywhere!)
There are some social media links in the footer. Their Facebook page was created in February 2020 and there is nothing on it! Likewise their Instagram account has nothing on it.
In Sam’s email, it says:
We are headquartered in the New Delhi-NCR, India.
We have our partners across the globe over the USA, UK, and Australia.
Their LinkedIn page has four addresses on it. The ‘primary’ one is in London, UK (but I thought their head quarters was in Delhi?!). The address in London is a Jewish restaurant (and it’s not called Digital Media Fox!)!
There’s an address in Australia, but it’s a normal house in the northern suburbs of Sydney.
There’s an address in the Cayman Islands, but that address belongs to a construction company with a very different name…
And there’s the address in Delhi/Noida, India (Noida is in the south east of Delhi). This address seems to be a hotel from what I can see, but there might be office space in the same building…
But it’s pretty obvious that the only vaguely accurate address is the one in Delhi. And if the other addresses are correct (I’m not conviced!) then the ‘partners’ of an Indian SEO company are a Jewish restaurant, a construction company and a normal house. That’s quite an unusual business model!!!
The about page has one paragraph of meaningless, jargon filled, text on it. It tells you absolutely nothing about the company or who they are!
Using the ‘wayback machine’, it seems that up until this year, another (rather iffy looking) SEO company used this domain. Looking at the history of the domain would seem to confirm this. It could help to explain why there’s nothing in their social media accounts…
On their home page are two testimonials. They’re both from sites related to helping American ex soldiers. Both sites have ‘made by Digital Media Fox’ type things in their footers – so we know that Digital Media Fox made these sites…
Both of the organisations look to be doing excellent work, but I’m afraid the standard of these sites, made by Digital Media Fox, leaves A LOT to be desired.
Neither of the sites use SSL/HTTPS. Both sites are full of HTML and accessibility issues (like having no alt text on their logos…). And sadly both are pretty terrible when it comes to SEO (like having no meta description and terrible meta titles, etc.).
So if they really are the best that Digital Media Fox can do; honestly, it’s pretty bad…
There’s screenshots (or images of) five sites on their ‘Our Work’ page. I’m not sure that two of these sites actually exist (I can’t find the companies or sites that they claim to be the sites of…) and of the other three, one is for a company who’s site is made by a different web agency and I can’t anything to suggest that Digital Media Fox have any connections with the other two companies/sites…
Conclusion
Digital Media Fox are yet another SEO spammer who hide behind generic accounts to spam people.
They don’t seem to know the basics of SEO yet want to tell other people how to do it.
So if Digital Media Fox want to ‘help’ with your site, the delete button might be your friend.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.