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…
We first dealt with Zthinkers back in February 2021, but they’re still at it, but they now have a different site domain/URL (more on that below). So let’s have another look at them…
Like their first spam, this one came in via the contact form on my Christmas site. So they MUST have visited the site before they visited it. They left a Gmail account on the form (which included the words ‘seo’ and ‘cheap’ in it…) and put the subject in as “Website Improve Offer”.
The contents of the spam went:
Hi
I am Aritra [name removed for privacy];
I was on your website. I am a marketing executive of an SEO, Web Design & Development Company. We have been offering SEO, Web Design, Web Development, PPC, Mail Marketing, Graphics Design, and complete Link Building Services for the last 9 years.
We will be happy to help to execute SEO & Web Design and Development projects at a much lower cost than what you have in-house. No compromise on quality!
We have just gone through your website and found some issues, that are as follows –
Your Website Title tag is not properly optimized.
The description tag is not properly optimized.
Google’s publisher is missing.
Canonical Tag Missing.
Robots File is not optimized properly.
Heading Tags Distribution is not proper (h1 to h6).
Some Image Alt Tags are missing.
Webpage content is not properly optimized.
Web page keywords density is low.
Keyword distribution is not proper throughout the webpage.
Social Media presence is low.
The website position in Google SERP is not so good.
The website is not ranked on the Majestic top million.
The website Alexa Rank is not good.
Website page speed is slow.
We would be happy to solve all this issue on behalf of you to bring the website in good SERP position.
Do let me know if you are interested then I will be happy to share our Methodologies and work details.
I am looking forward to your mail.
Kind Regards,
Aritra Agarwal
Skype ID: [removed for privacy]Disclaimer: This is an advertisement and a promotional mail strictly on the guidelines of CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. We have mentioned the source mail-id of this mail and the subject lines and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your mail address through our efforts on the web search and not through any illegal way. If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with “unsubscribe” in the subject line and we will take care that you do not receive any further promotional mail.
Now then, this is basically IDENTICAL to the spam they sent back in February. And just like then (as you can see for the first post about them) it’s total and utter rubbish and a basic ‘copy and paste’ template they spam people with.
But me being me, I replied! (Oh and I used the IDENTICAL reply to which I did back in February…)
Hi Aritra,
Wow that’s all very interesting! Please tell me more about what you think is wrong with the site and your company!
Thanks,
James
That got me this reply:
Hi,
Thanks for your reply. The website has some issues related to Off-page SEO. The website needs proper planning on Off-Page SEO and content marketing, it will improve the impression on Google and target keywords rank improvement.
We have very good price options to run the SEO campaign for any website.
I am from https://z-thinkers.com/, a SEO, Website and App development company based in India.
You can directly talk with us over
Skype: [removed for privacy]
WhatsApp: [removed for privacy]
Telegram: [removed for privacy]We will be happy to discuss with you more in detail. Expecting a positive response from your end.
Thanks & Regards
Aritra [removed for privacy]
Well, as we’ll see, this is the first in an ever changing story from them. They said my site had lots of ‘on page’ issues. Now it’s ‘off page’, so I asked a couple of simple questions:
Hi,
What off page SEO needs to happen? Your initial email said there were lots of on page SEO issues as well. Can you tell me more about them?
Thanks.
And that got me this reply:
Hello,
Thanks for your reply. Yes, the website backlink profile and social media activities are very poor. You need to improve the website backlinks, local citations and Social media engagements. If you give us a chance to work on the website, we guarantee you very good quality work, target keywords rank improvement, social media engagements and many more.
Our price is starting from $110 + transaction charge only. If you are interested, let’s have a discussion over WhatsApp (+91 8017387749) or any other mode described in the last email.
You can even place orders over Fiverr or Upwork. Details are as follows
** zthinkersgroup | Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Local SEO | Fiverr
** Freelancer Profile (upwork.com)Thanks and Regards
Aritra [removed for privacy]
Hmm, ok, now that’s some different things. Backlinks. But they’ve still not answered my questions, so I asked again.
OK, that’s interesting.
However, I also asked about the on site issues that you said my site had in your initial email. Please can you tell me more about that?
Which got my this responce:
Hello,
You have a beautiful Website but it lacks very few part of Search Engine Optimization
Update Link URLs to be more human and Search Engine readableIncrease page text content
Setup & Install a Facebook Pixel
Create and link an associated LinkedIn profile
Add Twitter Cards
Implement an analytics tracking tool
Create and link associated Instagram profile
Note: The website On-page SEO score is A+ where Backlink Score is F and Social Score is C .I hope you will focus on these two sections to improve the website greatly. However, I have mentioned a few issues still found in the website. The website is getting very good amount of traffic so, I don’t think you need to focus on only Backlinks and Social presence section
If you want we can start the Backlinks and Social campaign for your website at $110 (USD) only.
Right. So now there are yet more different things that need sorting (only they don’t – more on this below). Now they’re saying that my site gets A+ for ‘on page’ things – but I thought my ‘on page’ things were terrible from their initial email!
AND they’ve still not answered my questions. So, I asked for the third time…
Hi,
OK, thanks for that. But none of those are the things you mentioned in your first email.
Again, please can you tell me more about those? Are they issues on my site? What’s wrong with those items? You said they were really bad – but now you say the on page is A+ – I’m confused!
Thanks.
Which got me this reply:
Hello,
Your website ON-Page has no such issue, only a few social related issues that I have mentioned in the last email.
Now you have to focus only on two field
Backlink Generation
Social presence improvement.
If you need any help here, please let me know.
Hmmm, so they’re confirming that the site DOESN’T have ‘on page’ issues. Well, now I’m getting well and truly confused (well not really as I know they’re talking a load of rubbish but a normal person could be confused…)!
So I asked for a FOURTH time:
I really am confused. In your first email you said that my site had issues in including:
Your Website Title tag is not properly optimized.
The description tag is not properly optimized.
Canonical Tag Missing.
Robots File is not optimized properly.
Heading Tags Distribution is not proper (h1 to h6).
Some Image Alt Tags are missing.
Webpage content is not properly optimized.
Web page keywords density is low.
Keyword distribution is not proper throughout the webpage.
Website page speed is slow.Those are ALL on site issues. But you’re now saying that my site doesn’t have any on site issues – and that’s it’s ‘A+’!
So why did you say that my site had all those issues in your first email?
You sent the email through the contact form, so you must have visited the site when you first contacted me.
Please can you explain why you said one thing in your first email and are now saying something completely different?
I’ve also checked my backlinks. According to Ahrefs, my site has nearly 80,000 backlinks with an 84% dofollow rate. Using Ubersuggest from Neil Patel, it says my site has nearly 85,000 backlinks from over 11,000 domains and that both of those are ‘Great’. But you’re saying my backlinks are bad? That doesn’t seem to make sense to me…
Please can you explain some more?
Thanks.
I KNOW that I have VERY GOOD backlinks, so I pointed that out.
All the previous replies had come in pretty quickly (within a day) but I waited a few days and thought I’d hear no more from them. But just under a week later I got this reply:
Hi,
We will charge you $89 (USD) per month only for 15 to 20 keywords optimization.
We can help drive up your website’s ranking on search engines, specifically on Google, since it’s the most popular search engine. We help you to rank high through various methods and strategies. We offer a package of various techniques and means for your website to be discovered.
I will handle both the On-page SEO with
Title, Meta description Optimization
Page content Optimization
Structure data markup
Technical SEO issue fixing etc
Will handle the Off-Page SEO with
Content Marketing and distribution through different channels
Link building
Guest Blogging
Article, web 2.0, Blog exchange etc
I’ll provide you quality SEO Work according to your instructions. Please award me the project so that we can discuss it more.
I will wait for your response.
Thanks & Regards
Aritra [removed for privacy]
Wait? What? Now they’re saying my site needs both on page and off page help again… It’s almost like they just copied and pasted this one in to try and shut me up as they couldn’t actually answer my questions about when they lied on their initial spam.
So I asked again – for the FIFTH time.
Hi,
OK, but you’ve told me most of that before and you still have not answered my (pretty simple) questions…
Again, in your first email you said that my site had issues in including:
Your Website Title tag is not properly optimized.
The description tag is not properly optimized.
Canonical Tag Missing.
Robots File is not optimized properly.
Heading Tags Distribution is not proper (h1 to h6).
Some Image Alt Tags are missing.
Webpage content is not properly optimized.
Web page keywords density is low.
Keyword distribution is not proper throughout the webpage.
Website page speed is slow.Those are ALL on page issues. But then you said my site DOES NOT have any on page issues.
But now, in your last email, you want to fix these on page items:
Title, Meta description Optimization
Page content Optimization
Structure data markup
Technical SEO issue fixing etcSo, please what is it? Does my site have on page issues or not?
You keep contradicting yourself! You said before that my site was A+ for on page things!!!
Please can you explain why you said it was bad in your first email, then said it was ok, and now say it isn’t again?
You also said my backlinks were bad. But then I told you that both Ahrefs and Ubersuggest from Neil Patel (two of the best backlinks checkers) say my site is ‘Great’ for backlinks. (I’ve also now checked on a couple of other backlinks sites and they also say that my sites has lots of very good backlinks…)
Please can you explain why you’re saying one thing but many other big SEO sites say something different?
Please just answer my questions. I don’t think I’m asking you anything unreasonable.
You contacted me, through my contact form, but now you keep saying different things or saying things which are very different to other big SEO sites!
It really is confusing…
It’s now been over a week since I sent that and I’ve heard nothing back. I guess they might have finally decided I’m a lost cause and have so have not bothered to reply – as they clearly are unable to answer my questions…
Their Report & Recommendations
I won’t got into details of the fake claims made in their initial spam, as I ripped those to pieces in my first post about Zthinkers. But I’ll quickly mention about the backlinks and those A+, F and C ‘ratings’.
In my first dealings with Zthinkers, they used an SEO site/tool called SEOptimer. It’s a good site and can tell you useful things. However, it can also flag some things as ‘errors’ when they’re just not applicable for some (possibly, many) sites. (It also seems a popular tool among SEO spammers.)
Zthinkers say my ‘Backlinks Score’ is ‘F’. But that’s just not true or what SEOptimer is actually saying.
If you use the free version of SEOptimer, it doesn’t actually tell you the number of backlinks as they want you to use their pay for version (and they make this clear)! The F is coming because some of my links/URLs have underscores in them. 20 years ago (when my site was created) this was the thing to do. Now hyphens are preferred. However my under-scored links/URLs still rank VERY highly on Google, so, erm, yeah…
SEOptimer also says that some of the links on my site have ‘nofollow’ on them. This is correct and those links have ‘nofollow’ for good and proper reasons. But auto tools can’t tell if links should or shouldn’t be using nofollow, so give you an error if any of your links have ‘nofollow’ set.)
As I put in my emails to them, I’ve checked my site on two very good (and very free!) backlinks checkers and my site is just fine (or ‘Great’ in fact). And of course Zthinkers could have also done this, but chose not to. Hmmmmm.
So Zthinkers giving an ‘F’ for backlinks is simply very wrong on a number of levels…
The ‘C’ (now SEOptimer gives it a B) for ‘social’ is because of three ‘not applicable’ items which are:
- Not having a Facebook Pixel (which are used if you run Facebook ads, which I don’t and they also have some privacy issues…)
- I don’t have an Instagram account (because I don’t want or need one!)
- I don’t have a LinkedIn account (which is for businesses and so totally useless for my non-business site!)
You can see my site’s full SEOptimer report here: https://www.seoptimer.com/whychristmas.com
So as you can see, just using the scores spat out by a useful, but limited, tool doesn’t give you the full story. It’s a shame that Zthinkers don’t seem to understand that (or they probably do, but don’t care).
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 now https://z-thinkers.com/ It was zthinkers.com – more on this below.
Although the domain has changed, the quality of it hasn’t…
For HTML Validation, my site has no errors. Their site has 5 errors and 56 warnings.
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 28 errors and 44 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: 60
Accessibility: 72
Best Practices: 67
SEO: 83
My site gets:
Performance: 96
Accessibility: 100
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 100
So my site is MUCH better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’.
Before we look at the ‘quality’ of their site. Let’s have a look at their domain change…
Zthinkers have gone from using zthinkers.com to z-thinkers.com.
zthinkers.com was registered in September 2015 and expired on the 15th September 2021.
The day after zthinkers.com expired, z-thinkers.com was registered.
Was the change because they didn’t have access to their own domain and couldn’t renew it?! If so, that’s TERRIBLE. You’re always given WEEKS of warning about domain renewals.
I’ve had some domain renewal issues with a couple of my clients, but I’ve always helped them to either renew their domain, or get a replacement one going before their old one ‘died’.
Switching domains without having redirects in place is also TERRIBLE for SEO and means you’re basically starting from scratch. But I guess if your main way of getting business is spamming people, that doesn’t really matter…
I wonder if they’ll grab zthinkers.com when it comes back into circulation through the domain expiry system? I’m rather tempted to try and back order it myself!
Oh and they still list their site as zthinkers.com on their Facebook page, so they’ve not been bothered to change it on there then…
Let’s look at some other things on their site.
They have ‘skipped’ Heading levels. This isn’t good as it can confuse search engines and those who use assistive technology.
They don’t have a privacy policy – oops (well more than ‘oops’, more like ‘illegal’ in many countries now…)! Oh and that ‘CAN-SPAM’ notice on the bottom of their spam to me is totally useless and worthless…
There are social links in the footer, but none of them are links to actual accounts – so pretty much unless then. One is a link to Google+. But that closed OVER THREE YEARS AGO. Remember, this site is less than two months old.
There are some quotes from clients on the home page. The English in them is TERRIBLE and the company name isn’t spelled correctly in one!
There are some broken/missing images on the site’s footer.
On the about page, there are more missing/broken images. These are meant to be icons for their ‘working process’. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that they’ve done a good working process on their own site!
The images are broken because they’re trying to get the images from their OLD domain. When migrating a site, to a new location, it’s a fundamental step to make sure all the internal references are updated.
This is very basic stuff and the fact they’ve not bothered to fix this is pretty appalling.
There are some numbers on their about page. These look impressive, but they only do so because they’re the demo/example ones which come with the theme and they’ve not been bothered to change these (it’s an SEO agency theme that’s used by several of the SEO spammers who’ve spammed me…).
Other things on the about page they’ve not been bothered to update is the vision statement (which is full of example text and makes NO SENSE whatsoever in regard to an SEO business) or the names and pictures (which are cartoons) of their staff.
On their site and some other places the say they’ve been in business for either 7 or 9 years, both are wrong, it’s 6. We know this from when zthinkers.com was first registered.
So when they said in an email that “we guarantee you very good quality work”, from their own site, I wouldn’t exactly guarantee it…
At least Zthinkers don’t lie about where they’re located. They said they’re in India and sure enough, there’s a Kolkata address on the site.
Conclusion
Zthinkers have been using the same email spam template for months (if not years). It’s completely full of misinformation (well flat out lies). Some of the ‘issues’ might be correct on some sites (by random chance). But we know that Zthinkers don’t care about this. They just send the same spam template over and over again. (Oh and of course break multiple international anti-spam and privacy laws in the process.)
They’re also happy to manually spam contact forms. That’s not good or exactly trustworthy is it…?
They refuse (and/or are unable) to answer some basic questions about the contents of their spam emails.
Their own site is full of amazingly basic errors and they don’t seem to know how to move a site from one domain to another (which, you know, you might want to do when developing a site…).
It also seems that they might have lost control/access to their own domain. That’s. Not. Good.
With all of the above, I can see no reason whatsoever that you’d like Zthinkers anywhere near your site.
But, as ever, the choice is yours..