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…
[Edit June 2022. All the below stands. KPL Tech Solution also appear to operate as ‘Easy Ranking by SEO’.]
[Edit April 2024: There’s also KPL Global Consulting who are part of the same group – and also send out SEO spam from kplglobalconsulting.com emails.]
This time the email came in from a ‘Naveen’, a male name, who was using an Gmail address that had a female name and some numbers in it (so not a good start).
The subject of the spam was “FYI: SEO Service” and went:
Hello,
Hope you are doing well,
I run a digital marketing agency and with our integrated internet marketing services (SEO,SMO,Content Marketing, all website work and mobile apps),we have helped several brands beat their competitors.
We provide guaranteed ranking improvement and get your website ranking on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing.
If do you want your website to be ranked on 1st page of Google for sales generating keywords?
Please share me your website URL, keywords which you would like to target.
Kind Regards,
Naveen
So I replied to Naveen…
Hi Naveen,
It sounds like you think you can do a lot for my site.
Please can you look at www.whychristmas.com? I would be interested to see what your report says!
My keywords are:
Christmas Traditions
Christmas Around the World
The Christmas Story for childrenand I’m targeting globally.
Also, please can you tell me more about your company? Where are you located?
James
And I got this reply from an ‘Emma’ who was using an @kpltechsolution.com email and it was also CC-ed to a ‘Nelson’ also with an @kpltechsolution.com email.
Hi
Trust you are doing well!
Please find below the response that we got from you through an email about your website.
……………………………………………………..Hi Naveen,
It sounds like you think you can do a lot for my site.
Please can you look at www.whychristmas.com? I would be interested to see what your report says!My keywords are:
Christmas Traditions
Christmas Around the World
The Christmas Story for childrenand I’m targeting globally.
Also, please can you tell me more about your company? Where are you located?James
……………………………………………………..Who we are: www.kpltechsolution.com
Please find below the Overall Process/Strategies and Cost Involved:-
Cost:- US$ 1000 (50 Keywords, Month to Month Basis, No Contract)
We will be helping you with the following:-
Improving the keyword ranking
Improving the organic traffic and visibility
Making your website search engine friendly.
Social bookmarking, Classified submissions
Fixing all the errors covered under SEO
Creating good quality back-links
Content optimization
Article marketing, blog marketing
A) Setting up Goals -At Beginning of SEO work, we set up the goals for your website, We go through Different process of setting up the goals of the Website and certain page like Below:-1) An in-depth search of your Business
2) In-depth Search of your target Audience
3) Proper Analysis with suggestions on different things like what information your website should provide to its users, this process keeps your website focus on your Primary goals and helps to build a profitable businessB) Keyword Research:- It determines what language or terminology used in Searches, We cover these basic points in this:-
1) Research on Imperative Keywords according to the nature of your Business.
2) Create a master list of possible search terms that your audience can and will use while looking at a similar product you are offering.
3) Identify and Finalize the set of keywords for your site.C) Keywords vs Targeted Pages:- Next step is to select the proper page of the website, that should be targeted for each shortlisted Keyword after your approval of the suggested Keywords.
D) Site Analytics setup:- Next step is the site analysis and reporting of user activity on your website. We set up Google Analytics to measure the activity of the traffic landed on your website.
E) Competitive Analysis:- We will analyze the competitors of your website, and suggest suggestions /recommendations on the following items:-
1) Who your main competition is, or you can also suggest your competitor’s website to us for analysis.
2) What they are doing to rank in top search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Bing
3) How to Beat them.F) On-Page Optimization:- Below are the activities been covered:-
Back Link Analysis and upload report to Teamwork
Google Penalty Check and upload report to Teamwork
Duplicate Content Check and upload report to Teamwork
Questionnaire for Content Creation
Business Listing Details Verification – Data Specification Sheet
Create URL Mapping Sheet & Baseline Ranking Report – upload to Teamwork
Perform manual Critical Website Analysis and upload report to Teamwork
Create a Competitor Analysis Report and upload it to Teamwork
Create robots.txt file
Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it in webmasters tools
Setup Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and configure settings.G) Off-Page Optimization:- Following points will be cover in this:-
Article Writing & Submission
Guest Posts
Blog Writing & Submission
Social Bookmarking
Product Submissions
Classified Submissions
Reviews Writing and Submission
Web 2.0 Creations
Profile Creations
QnA (Quora)
Image Sharing and Optimization
Video Marketing & Submission
H) Social Media:- We will create or manage your social media pages(I) Reports:- Reports will be provided every month, it includes the Keyword ranking report and website statistic report.
Please suggest a good time so that we can schedule a call and I can explain our services to you and discuss further??
A reply would be highly appreciated!
Regards,
Emma | Business Development Manager
So a fairly standard “we’ll do everything in the world for you” type copy and paste reply…
However, it didn’t tell my why my site needed their help, so I asked!
Hi Emma,
Thanks for all of that. Please can you tell me what’s wrong with my site at the moment? Have you checked how I’m ranking on those keywords!?
Thanks
And I got this reply:
Thank you so much for writing back.
My team has done some extensive analysis on your website, Please find the attached On page suggestion and keyword ranking report of your website.
On page suggestion includes all the errors and changes that we would recommend to be done on your website to make it search engine friendly and will optimize.
Keywords ranking report shows where your website is ranking for the keywords we have analysed and it also shows the search volume and the competition of those keywords. You can add / remove / replace any of the keywords.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Attached were two PDFs. One for the site report and one with the keywords. We’ll look at those shortly.
Well, I did have some questions, so I asked…
Hi Emma,
I’ve been a web designer and developer for 20 over years. I like to reply to SEO spammers to see what 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 pageloads last year – so it’s doing pretty well!
As you asked, I do have some questions.
Why do you think it’s OK to spam people from random Gmail accounts – and so break several international anti-spam laws in the process?
Why does it say you’re in the USA on your site when you’re really in Noida? (2b, Emma isn’t your real name is it?)
Why don’t you get your own site working properly before telling other people how you run their site? (Your Performance score is in the 30s, that’s pretty terrible!)
Why did you send me 17 out of the 25 keyword suggestions for things that would be for sale on a site, when it’s clear that I do not sell anything on my site?!
Please do not spam me again.
I’ve not heard back after that one…
Their Report & Recommendations
As I said above, there were two PDFs attached to the second of the emails from ‘Emma’. There was ‘On Page Report’ and a ‘Keyword Suggestion Report’.
The ‘On Page Report’ had a series of bullet points (as per the bolds below) and that’s it. Some items also had screenshots from various web tools with them, but with no explanations.
Let’s see what they say the ‘errors’ on my site are…
Title: Website title is not SEO friendly.
The meta title is an important element for both users and search engines as it convey’s the document’s primary topic and purpose. It is used to form the headings of entries in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and can therefore increase clicks through to a ranking web page or document.
They don’t say why it’s not SEO friendly. So that is really not helpful. Also, the title IS VERY SEO friendly. So this is WRONG.
Meta description: Meta Description is not SEO Friendly.
A meta description is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines.
See above. They don’t say why and it really is SEO friendly. Again, WRONG.
Meta keywords: Meta keyword Tag is not SEO friendly. Not present on website’s all pages.
Hmmm, can you see a pattern here?! The odd thing is that the keywords tags hasn’t been used by the likes of Google for YEARS. Most SEO people recommend NOT having it now. My site does have it as it’s still in there and I’ve not been bothered to take it out as it doesn’t ‘hurt’ you. (But I don’t use it on new sites.) So this is WRONG on several levels.
Title Length: Website title length is low as recommended length.
They don’t tell you what the recommended length is! Most SEO people say my title is too long… It is technically just ‘too long’ but it doesn’t hurt the site. So again, VERY WRONG.
Website Speed Dimension of SEO
Website speed is Average on Mobile (88%).
OK, so is that good or bad? Oh yeah, they don’t say! It’s a score from Google’s PageSpeed tool (which they don’t tell you!). These scores can change depending on the time of day you run the test, etc. It can go from the high 80s to early 90s. It’s really pretty good. (They’re site gets 28, so, erm, yeah…)
Heading Tags: – heading tags (h1, h2….h6) optimization needed according to requirement of the page and keyword.
Well, this is a factually correct statement in how you use headings. It’s just not correct about my site as it already uses headings correctly. So WRONG.
AMP – It seems that this page does not have an AMP version. If you are a publisher, you should think about creating Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is an easy way to make your pages load instantly on any mobile device.
Another factually correct statement. However, as I’m not a publisher, it’s irrelevant for my site (and the value of AMP pages have really come into question over the last few months for SEO…)
Schema.org : Schema.org is not present in your website
This is true. It’s also because the site doesn’t need it. I have nothing on my site which you use schema for (it’s used for things like events and products, etc.). So irrelevant.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is not monitoring your website.
Also true. Because I value the privacy of visitors to my site. I use a privacy friendly analytics tool! So irrelevant.
Percentage of Quality Backlinks: 55%
Erm, OK. Again, what does this mean!? I’m guessing it means that 55% of the backlinks to my site (which they can find) have ‘do follow’ on them. Using different tools will also give you different numbers. When I run tests I get 87%!
Need to create and place Geo Meta Tag in the head section of the site.
GEO Tags are a simple way of telling Search Engines what physical region or location the page serves.
This is true. It’s also completely irrelevant in my case, as I’m target ‘global’ traffic (you know, like I told them in my first email to them…)!
Gzip Compression: We could not identify GZIP compression being used on your website. We recommend enabling this feature as it can reduce page size by 70% and significantly speed up page load for users.
Hmmm, you would have thought that the ‘Best Digital Marketing Agency, SEO Services and Web Development Company’ (as they claim to be) would know that there are lots of free online tools where you can check this is about 5 seconds.
My site does indeed gzip! But can you guess? THEIR SITE DOESN’T!!!
PA = 53 , DA = 65
Guess what? They don’t tell what these mean!!! PA stands for ‘Page Authority’ and DA for ‘Domain Authority’. These are numbers created by some big SEO sites to give you an idea of what Google might think of your site. However, Google DOES NOT use them.
Different SEO people will tell you what ‘good’ scores for these are. But generally a PA over 50 is good and a DA over 60 is good.
Checking their site, the PA is 26 and the DA is 21 – ouch.
The last three items on the PDF are items from Google’s Lighthouse speed tool (not that they tell you that).
Minimize MAIN Thread Work
There was just a screenshot from the report. No explanation, no nothing. Helpful as ever then…
What’s odd is that when I run Lighthouse on my site – I don’t get this error and it ‘passes’. The screenshot shows it taking over 5 seconds. But when I run it, it takes 0.6 seconds!
However, their site takes 5.8 seconds!
Reduce Javascript Execution Time
Another screenshot without an explanation! And other one that passes on my test but on when they ran it! The screenshot shows it took 2111ms (just over 2 seconds) when they ran the test but when I run it, it’s 280ms! Something is odd.
Lastly, they say my site has a ‘Performance’ score of 74. When I run the test it gives it 88! Their site gets 33…!
So overall, a mess of a report. For most people it would be pretty confusing, as basically nothing is explained. And for geeks, like me, it looks like a complete load of rubbish!
Next up, their keyword suggestions…
The ‘Keyword Suggestion Report’ had a table of keywords. As well as the keywords, there were columns for ‘AVG Monthly Search’ (most of the numbers of which seemed very wrong to me), ‘Competition’ (either High or Low, these seemed very random as to what is high and low) and ‘Ranking’ (all of which had N/A in, although they could have checked themselves before sending my the report!).
Doing keywords suggestions without knowing much about a site/company/business, can be a bit challenging. But a few minutes on my site should make it clear that it’s a site with lots of Christmas information and also that it DOES NOT sell anything…
They had 25 Keyword suggestions. Let’s look at them and see where the site already ranks – well for the sensible ones anyway… (I tested the places on Google using a VPN placing me in the USA as that’s where most of my site’s traffic comes from.)
- Buy Christmas Trees – I don’t sell anything. This is a pointless suggestion.
- Christmas Traditions – I suggested this one! It’s already #7 on Google.
- Christmas Tree Sale – See Number 1!
- Decorated Christmas Trees – See Number 1!
- Christmas Greeting Cards – See Number 1!
- Custom Christmas Greeting Cards – See Number 1!
- Christmas Food Recipes – Not in the top 50. I’m not surprised. There are a few recipes on my site but I don’t target traffic for this…
- Cheap Christmas Trees – See Number 1!
- Christmas Traditions and Customs – It’s already #2 on all of Google!
- History Behind Christmas – It’s already #1 on all of Google!
- Personalized Christmas Cards – See Number 1!
- The Colors of Christmas – It’s already #1 on all of Google!
- Christmas Story for Children – It’s already #1 on all of Google!
- Small Artificial Christmas Trees – See Number 1!
- Small White Christmas Tree – See Number 1!
- Traditional Christmas Tree – See Number 1!
- Funny Christmas Tree – See Number 1! (And WHAT?!)
- Types of Xmas Trees – See Number 1!
- Buy Christmas Cards – See Number 1!
- Small Decorated Christmas Tree – See Number 1!
- Cool Christmas Trees – See Number 1!
- Online Carol Service – It’s already #1 on all of Google (for the site and video on YouTube)!
- Christmas Story for Children – Erm, this is a repeat of number 13!
- Reusable Christmas Tree – See Number 1!
- Real Christmas Tree Decorated – See Number 1!
So out of their 25 (well 24 as one was a duplicate) suggestions, 17 were pointless as they were about items which would be for sale and I don’t sell anything!
Out of the remaining seven, two were ones I suggested. I suggested them because they’re already very highly ranked.
That leaves five. Out of those, 3 are already #1 on Google! One is #7 and one has a fairly bad ranking – which I’d fully expect as it’s not something I’m targeting.
L’ll use ‘Christmas Traditions and Customs’ (already #2 on all of Google) as an example of their ‘AVG Monthly Search’ and ‘Competition’ wrongnesses. They say it gets 100 to 1000 searches a month – that’s obviously VERY wrong. And that competition is ‘Low’ – although there’s over 89 MILLION results for it on Google. So you can see what I mean about that…
I know I said that suggesting keywords can be challenging, but having pretty much all of them either being completely pointless or for things that are already amazingly highly ranked is rather amazingly bad.
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.kpltechsolution.com/
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 78 errors and 4 warnings, that isn’t good!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 27 errors and 1 contrast errors, again, not exactly good. My site has no errors of either kind!
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 32
Accessibility: 71
Best Practices: 67
SEO: 91
My site gets:
Performance: 95
Accessibility: 97
Best Practices: 87
SEO: 92
So my site is better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’. But that’s just the start…
Although their site does have an SSL certificate (uses https/has a padlock), it doesn’t automatically redirect to the https version. This is generally a bad idea and can hurt you SEO wise (oops…)
Their home page has 21 (TWENTY ONE) Heading 1s!!! You should only have 1 (ONE). Erm, yeah.
The site does have real terms and privacy pages. And unlike most SEO sites who spam you, the content of them is actually fairly decent.
However, they don’t say that they use both Google Analytics and Facebook Tracking. Not telling people you use those breaks several international privacy laws at the very least.
And this is the opening of the section about Cookies on the site, which I think might win the award for the ‘most bizarre and confusing thing ever said about cookies’:
Our Site may also use “cookies” to beautify User revel in. User’s net browser locations cookies on their tough pressure for file-preserving functions and occasionally to song records approximately them.
There are two addresses in the USA on the site. A ‘Registered Office’ in Delaware and the ‘Sales Office’ in Florida (the Florida address was also on the footer of Emma’s emails).
Looking up the addresses, the address in Delaware in an office block. However, it seems to be one used by a very large number of companies for ‘front/mailing’ address but who don’t actually have a ‘real’ office there…
And the ‘Sales Office’, well the address for that is actually for Florida Gulf Coast University – which is rather, erm, interesting…
There’s also a phone number on the site with a USA dial code – which is for New York, in fact the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island!
KPL Tech Solutions claim to be ‘a leading IT company in USA, UK & Canada’ and the Delaware address is used across their social media accounts.
However, on their social media accounts, they also give the name of the company as ‘KPL Tech Solution Pvt Ltd’. ‘Pvt Ltd’ is the naming convention of Indian companies. It is NOT used by businesses in the USA, UK or Canada!
If we look at their LinkedIn account, it lists some of their employees. All of the employees have sub-continental names and pretty much all of them say they’re in or near Delhi or Noida (a satellite city of Delhi)! Hmmmm.
And a Google of the full company name (with the Pvt Ltd) shows some job sites listing KPL Tech Solution – all of them saying it’s in Noida! (One even has photos of its office in Noida.)
And… there’s also the fact that on a business listing site for India, it says that company was registered in June 2020 in India (although the domain was registered in 2014, which is all a bit odd)! This listing also gives the office address in Noida.
The only employee on LinkedIn using the Delaware address is the CEO. However, a bit more Googling of him turns up a number of business people type profiles – all in and around Delhi! One even says “The Kpl Tech Solution office address is located at Noida, Uttar Pradesh”…! (There’s also one using the Delaware address but then it has an Indian phone number next to it…)
I also found the CEO’s Instagram account. Let’s just say that I’m pretty convinced he’s in India and not Delaware…
And the time that Naveen & Emma emailed me would have been VERY early in the morning in the USA but early afternoon in Noida!
So KPL Tech Solution appear to be (yet another) Indian based SEO company fragrantly stating that they’re based in the USA, UK, etc. when they’re nothing of the sort…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have no issues with Indian based web companies; but I do have issues with any company that flat out lies!
On the KPL Tech Solution testimonials page, there are some videos which appear to be genuine. There are also some text based ones.
Some (pretty much all) of the photos of the people on there are ‘interesting’.
One photo is of Betty Cohan. She created the Cartoon Network! It seems unlikely that a big business woman like that would be using a spammy SEO company. Interestingly, a reverse image search of this photo also shows it being used on a site for ‘hostingsellerpro.com’ which takes you to the KPL site. That domain was registered in 2019 in… Noida!!!
There’s are also reviews from a ‘Nicholas Vargas’ – he’s a real professional footballer from Chile and a ‘Robinson’ who was a big basketball star at Michigan University (hmmmm).
There’s a photo of a ‘Joan’, only it’s a photo of a man and seems to come from a Twitter account of an Alain who’s in The Netherlands!
There’s one from a ‘Chris’, only his photo is actually of a man called ‘Chris’ who has a different last name…
There’s also one from an ‘Alaina’. A reverse image search of that photo brings up lots of articles about an AI site which can create amazingly realistic faces called ‘This Person Does Not Exist’…!
I also Googled the text of the testimonials. Without fail, they’re all on other sites! Some on other (questionable looking) SEO sites and some on legitimate marketing agencies.
Many of the testimonials are also on the site (or the Trust Pilot reviews) of another SEO company (‘SEO with Pro’) which claims to have offices in the USA, Canada and Australia, but in reality is also in Noida! They also claim to have been in business for over 10 years but seem to have started in 2017. And they also have reviews left on Trust Pilot saying they’re a spammer… (Oh and the review from ‘Betty Cohan’ was actually left by a ‘Seema’ from India on SEO with Pro on Trust Pilot.)
So all of that really doesn’t inspire me with confidence.
Do you remember that in Naveen’s first bit of spam he said “We provide guaranteed ranking improvement and get your website ranking on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing.” Well, Google have something to say about claims like 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
So KPL Tech Solution are yet another SEO company that spams from behind random Gmail accounts.
They also claim to be based in the USA, when they’re very clearly not.
They also claim to ‘guarantee’ you page one search results – only Google says not to trust a company which says that.
So if KPL Tech Solution send you an email, I’d take Google’s advice.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…