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 a ‘Lisa’ who was using an @rankyourweb.net email address.
The subject of the spam was “Proposal…” and went:
Hi,
Your website is not ranking well on Google?
I can help you in putting your website on the Google top page and getting more customers Guaranteed.
Please let me know if you are interested. I will send you a proposal for your website.
Regards,
Lisa
Well, that spam certainly makes some rather big claims (more of those later…) and ‘Lisa’ doesn’t seem to know how to correctly construct questions in English. Anyway, I replied to ‘Lisa’:
Hi Lisa,
That sounds interesting. What company do you work for and where are you located?
Can you look at this site www.whychristmas.com and see what you think of it?
Thanks
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’…
The next day I got a rather lengthy copy and paste reply from a Ravi who seems to be the boss. He was using an @inditeweb.com email address. It didn’t answer any of my questions about my site and why it needed their help. Here it is:
Hi James,
Thanks for contacting us.I am Ravi [name removed for privacy], Business Head with inditeweb.com. A member of my marketing executive team connected with you. We are a website design and SEO agency, our expertise is making your business and brand popular using our tried and tested search engine marketing techniques.
We understand that you are one of the Agency customer, we are Indian based Digital Marketing company, please visit our website www.inditeweb.com
We checked the website:- www.whychristmas.com and I would like to offer you our advanced optimization plan that will give you Google top page ranking for the relevant search terms.
SEO Services: – We will make your website reach page one of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. To give you basic idea of our digital marketing promotional strategies we provide complete On-Page, Off- Page, Local Listings for websites that rank in top positions of major search engines. We will make sure that your site is SEO friendly and is reaching on Google, Yahoo and Bing page 1 top 3 positions for the desired traffic generated key phrases that are relevant to your business so that people can see the website and visit it. Thus, increase your sales. We use white hat SEO techniques and follow Google algorithm to get stable and long-term rankings on page 1.
SEO Price- Our monthly cost is $150USD monthly. In this price we will optimize your relevant highly competitive 20 keywords so that your business could fetch maximum relevant traffic thereby increasing no. of visitors in terms of leads.
What we will do:
§ Make your website Google friendly and search friendly fixing all errors and updating it as per Google standards.
§ Increase more relevant traffic for the website and increase in sales from the website.
§ Ensure healthy manual backlinks are created to increase website ranking.
§ Bring your website on Top pages of Google for the keywords we are targeting.
§ The best part of all this is you will review the progress every month, so the pressure is on us to deliver the results.
I would like to share you our SEO action plan that we will apply for the website, please have a look it at below:-
Initial Setup & Analysis
Website Analysis – Yes
Keywords Research – Yes
User Experience Analysis – Yes
Competition Analysis – Yes
Google & Bing Webmasters Setup – Yes
Google Analytics Setup – Yes
Initial Rank Report – Yes
Conversion Tracking Setup – Yes
On-Page Optimization
Title & Meta Tags Optimization – Yes
Website Stricture & Navigation Check – Yes
Duplicate Content Check – Yes
Website Page Speed Check – Yes
Mobile Friendliness Check – Yes
Internal Link Structure Check – Yes
Heading Tag Optimization (H1, H2, H3…) – Yes
Canonicalization/301 Redirect Check – Yes
Schema Code Check – Yes
Broken Link Check – Yes
Robots.txt File Creation – Yes
XML Sitemap Creation – Yes
Htaccess File Creation – Yes
SEO Friendly URL Structure Check – Yes
Linking to Social Profiles – Yes
Content Marketing
Blog Post – 1
Guest Post Writing & Outreach – 1
Press Release Writing – 1
Article Writing – 1
Link Acquisition Strategy
Business Profiles – 5
PPT Creation – 1
PPT Submission – 5
Blog Comment Discussion – 5
Forum Discussion – 5
Social Bookmarking – 40
Search Engine Submission – 10
Directory Submission – 10
Product Submission – 5
Local Search Optimization
Google My Business/Bing Local Listing – Yes
Authority Business Listing – 5
NAP Syndication – Yes
Local Citation Building – 5
Authority Directory Submission – 5
Search Engine Ranking Report – Yes
Monthly SEO Performance Report – Yes
SEO Activity Report – Yes
Monthly Plan Of Action – Yes
Customer Support (Email, Chat, Telephone..) – Yes
These all SEO activities we will do for the website, each month during the optimization we will send you complete monthly report with progress result.
For any query or questions feel free to contact me:
[removed for privacy]
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Regards,
Ravi [removed for privacy]
CEO & Founder
I replied to Ravi asking if he could actually answer my questions:
Hi Ravi,
Thanks for your email. Please can you tell me WHY my site needs you help? What’s wrong with it now?
If it helps to answer those questions, my target terms are:
Christmas, Christmas Around The World, The Christmas StoryThanks!
This got me this reply;
Hi James,
Thanks for your response.
I want to tell you that, we need to implement the SEO things as it’s very important for any website if you want to get better performance into search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN. As I sent you our action plan in my previous email, I hope you must have review that.
The website need good backlinks, many other activities as I mentioned for the keywords and it will get Google top page ranking.
Please let me know if you have any further query.
Waiting for your response.
OK, but that still didn’t answer my questions, so I asked again…
Hi Ravi,
Thanks but that doesn’t answer my questions. I asked what is WRONG with it now – specifically?
Thanks.
And I got another reply, with some sort of answers!
Hi James,
Actually, I mentioned everything that we need to do for the website in our plan.
Okay, I am going to tell you in more details. The website missing, meta title, heading tag, Google analytics etc.
We will implement all these things for the website, after that we will develop backlinks so that it can get listed in Google for the relevant search terms.
I replied to Ravi asking why they thought it was OK to spam people and clarified those ‘missing’ things which he said my site had:
Hi Ravi,
I’ve been a web designer and developer for 20 over years. I like to reply to SEO spammers to see what ‘services’ they offer and the things they say and use to get clients.
My Christmas site www.whychristmas.com has also been on the web for over 20 years. It had well over 20 MILLION page loads last year – so it’s doing pretty well!
My site HAS GOT meta titles and heading tags – so both of those are wrong. I don’t use Google Analytics because I value the privacy of the visitors to my site. I use a privacy friendly analytics tool.
My site also has A LOT of backlinks (over 80,000).
And if you’d bothered to check those keywords I sent you, you’d have seen that it’s ALREADY one page one (normally #1) for hundreds of Christmas related terms.
Please can you tell me why you think it’s OK to spam people – breaking several international anti-spam laws? And why do you do it from a domain (rankyourweb.net) which doesn’t have a site and not your main domain? It is because you don’t want your main domain caught as being a spammer?
Why should I (or anyone) trust a company that spams people?
Well, I’ve not heard back after that one. It really doesn’t seem like Ravi likes answering questions…
Their Report & Recommendations
As you can see from my email to Ravi, none of the ‘missing’ things on my site are correct. 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 https://inditeweb.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 6 errors and 34 warnings. (Actually not bad for SEO spammers but that’s probably because they’re using a decent off the shelf template.)
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 13 errors and 64 contrast errors (which isn’t great). My site has no errors of either kind!
Using the GTMetrix speed test tool their site gets:
Overall Grade: F (the lowest grade)
Performance 41%
Structure 61%
My site gets:
Overall Grade: A
Performance 100%
Structure 100%
So my site is perfect and their site leaves quite a lot to be desired…
There’s NO meta description on the Indite Web site. This is one of the very basics of SEO (it’s one of the things they say they’ll do on your site), yet it seems that a growing number of SEO spammers can’t be bothered to set it on their own sites.
The copyright on the site is still 2020 – it’s over 1/4 of the way through 2021.
There are social media links in the header of the site to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – only the LinkedIn doesn’t go anywhere (again, this is something they say they’ll check on your site but haven’t done on their own site). Indite Web are using a theme on their site called ‘Nanosoft’ (which I’ve seen some other SEO spammers use as well) but they don’t seem to know how to do the basics of removing an icon from it…
There’s a privacy policy ‘page’ on the site – but there is NO content in it. So that’s useless then.
On the about page, it says that Indite Web have been in business for 13 years. However, their domain was registered in January 2015 and their Facebook page was created in June 2016. So, erm, yeah, something’s not right with that.
On the contact page, there’s a link/heading to view their location on a map. Only there is no map. I guess they couldn’t work out how to get that setup properly either!
The domain which ‘Lisa’ spammed me from was rankyourweb.net which was registered in 2019. There’s no site on it, it seems that it’s primarily used for spamming people…
In the initial spam from ‘Lisa’ and also in the first reply from Ravi, there were claims that they could get a site onto the ‘Google top page’. However, Google have something to say about that…
Beware of SEO companies that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.
from Google’s “Do you need an SEO?”
Conclusion
Indite Web send out spam from a domain which isn’t their main/business one. That alone is rather iffy.
I had to ask a simple question numerous times before I got a (sort of) answer. This answer was COMPLETELY wrong – which they could have easily checked!
They say they’ll do a huge long list of things for your site, only they clearly have done many of the very basic ones on their own site!
So if Indite Web say they can get you onto the ‘Google top page’, I’d take Google’s own advice and ‘beware’.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…