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 time the email came in from ‘James’ who was using a Gmail address that had his name in it, only there were extra letters in it… The spam email subject was “whyeaster.com – Get Top Position on Search Engine and Increase Visitors” and went:
Hello whyeaster.com Team,
I found your website online; your website UI UX is really awesome. However, I am astonished to see that you have minimal website visitors and poor ranking in Search Engine Result Pages.
I can help you drive more visitors to your website and improve your ranking. With our innovative and dedicated strategy, you can get first positions in search engines.
We provide a long term lifeline of your internet marketing. Our strategy is affordable and the long term benefits have proven, they are right for your business.
By listening to you and determining your business needs, we will put together a successful plan that will help you accomplish your goals as well as change the way you do business online.
Our marketing strategy will help you:
· Getting higher rank in Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
· Increase in your visitor’s rate.
· Creating a brand value for your website
· Getting a high ROI
With your consent, My ‘Business Development Manager’ would be happy to forward you a brief proposal of our work process, cost- friendly website marketing plans that are purely based on latest search updates.
Waiting for your valid response.
With Warm Regards
James [name removed for privacy although I’m 99% sure it’s fake!]
Business Development Executive
Well, that email makes some claims which we’ll take a look at later! Anyway, I replied…
Hi,
Wow it sounds like my site needs your help!
Please can you tell me what’s wrong with my site?
Also, please can you tell me more about your company?
Thanks.
And within two hours I got this reply:
Hello,
How are you?
Hope you are doing well!
This is Sarah from Ally webbing and I am the Digital Marketing Analyst and Marketing Consultant for Ally webbing.
We are a full-service Digital Marketing company offering Digital Marketing, Web UX & UI, Content Marketing, Hosting etc. We have been into the business for 10 years and we have almost 100+ clients from various countries mainly US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc. We have happy customers worldwide and we intend to spread business growth to all small, medium & large companies.
I see you’re using old school link building – which a lot of cheap firms recommend, but will kill your search engine rank in the long term. The solution is on page, fixing errors, targeted blog posts with custom email outreach – we’ve had clients go from page six to page one on google within 5 months.
Your website still uses metatags. These don’t do anything for google, and actually allow your competitors easy access to the keywords you use. It’s better instead to naturally put keywords into your blog posts or web-pages.
First of all we fix all of the on-page errors like- meta title and tag optimization.
Broken links fixation.
XML sitemap updating.
Seo Friendly.Hope to hear from you soon.
Regards
Sarah [name removed for privacy although I’m 99% sure it’s fake!]
Business Development Manager
Ally Webbing
This email from ‘Sarah’ came from an email with an @insightproservices.com address. Why not an @allywebbing.com one I wonder?! Hmmm…
It’s also rather odd and almost reads like an initial spam email template…
Their Report & Recommendations
Let’s look at some of what ‘Sarah’ said in her email to see if it makes any sense and/or if it’s true (tl:dr, it doesn’t and it isn’t!)…
I see you’re using old school link building – which a lot of cheap firms recommend, but will kill your search engine rank in the long term. The solution is on page, fixing errors, targeted blog posts with custom email outreach – we’ve had clients go from page six to page one on google within 5 months.
Well… first off I AM NOT using ‘old school link building’ and there’s no way that Ally Webbing could tell that! Fixing errors, having blog posts and using emails can all help. However, most of this para is rubbish.
Your website still uses metatags. These don’t do anything for google, and actually allow your competitors easy access to the keywords you use.
Hmmm, that sentence is just odd. My site still uses the meta ‘description’ tag which Google VERY MUCH DOES STILL USE (erm, but their site doesn’t have…). I think what then might mean is the ‘keywords’ meta tag; Google now doesn’t use this – BUT NEITHER DOES MY SITE. So that one sentence is wrong in two separate ways, that’s quite an achievement!
It’s better instead to naturally put keywords into your blog posts or web-pages.
This is actually correct – they got something right! However, going back to the sentence above, people can generally tell what keywords you’re targeting from looking at the content. To use one of their terms, checking the keywords tag is ‘old school’!
First of all we fix all of the on-page errors like- meta title and tag optimization.
My site doesn’t have any on page errors and all it’s titles and description tags are already optimised… (Unlike their site!)
Broken links fixation.
There aren’t any broken links on my site.
XML sitemap updating.
The XML sitemap is just fine.
Seo Friendly.
The site is already VERY SEO friendly. For instance if you Google ‘The Easter Story’ it’s in the first 2 or 3 results (out of hundreds of millions of results)!
So none of the ‘points’ which ‘Sarah’ put in the email are correct. Oh dear oh dear oh dear…
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://allywebbing.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 8 errors and 32 warnings.
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 9 errors and 20 contrast errors. My site has no errors of either kind!
Using the GTMetrix speed test tool their site gets:
Overall Grade: E
Performance 50%
Structure 55%
My site gets:
Overall Grade: A
Performance 100%
Structure 100%
So my site is MUCH better than their one in site optimisation!
They don’t use HTTPS/SSL (don’t have a padlock) on their site. This is really not good these days as having SSL helps to keep sites secure.
There’s no privacy policy on the site. Not only is this not good, it’s illegal in many countries now!
There’s no ‘Heading 1’ on the home page. This is one of the most things for SEO – you would have hoped that an SEO company would know this – but apparently not!
No meta descriptions on any of the pages. Again, these are very important for SEO and again, this SEO doesn’t seem to think they’re worth having on their own site!
In one of their emails, Ally Webbing claim they’ve been in the web business for over 10 years. However, their domain was registered in April 2018, their LinkedIn page says the company was founded in 2018, and both their Twitter and Facebook accounts were created in June 2018.
So, they’re lying. They’ve been in business for less than three years and NOT 10 years.
Also the domain from which ‘Sarah’ emailed me from (insightproservices.com) was registered in February 2020 – just over a year ago. It’s got an ‘out of the box’ template on there for job recruitment, but I’m not sure if the site actually does anything… And just like their main site, it’s full of basic HTML, accessibility and SEO issues (no meta descriptions here either)!
On their site there are two postal addresses. One in Bhubaneswar, India and one in New York. However, the address in New York is for an appartment block in Manhattan.
Both their Facebook and LinkedIn say that they’re located in Bhubaneswar and their domain was registered in Orissa (the Indian state where Bhubaneswar is).
And funnily enough, they list four employees on their LinkedIn page, these don’t include either a ‘James’ or a ‘Sarah’. They’re all men with Indian ethnic names…
So I highly doubt that Ally Webbing has any connection to New York whatsoever and that they are just another spammy SEO company putting a fake address in the USA on their site to make them look more important…
Conclusion
Ally Webbing are yet another SEO spammer who hide behind a Gmail account and fake names when spamming.
None of the information or things they want to do help my site in their emails is correct.
They have some amazingly basic errors throughout their own site but they want to tell others how to fix their sites. (erm, yeah)
So if Ally Webbing want to help with your site. I’d give it miss.
But the choice, as ever, is yours.