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 “Mark Wood” who was using an @gmail.com email address with his name, and a bunch of numbers in it. I normally don’t give out the last name of SEO spammers for privacy. However, I’m 100% sure that this name is fake…
The subject of the spam was “Boost your website’s Traffic & Ranking whychristmas.com” and went:
Hello whychristmas.com Team,
I hope this email finds you well.
This is Mark Digital Marketing Expert at Justclickrank.com SEO marketing enterprise. I just saw your website at internet. I have checked your website it’s a good website, while I came to know that your website suffering from a couple of issues.
Error’s to be fixed: whychristmas.com
Your page loading speed is not good:
Your Domain Authority score is 28 out of 100
The titles are incorrect.
Unique and optimized content is needed.
Need good search volume keywords in content plus text to HTML ratio alt attribute in the images.
Checking for unnecessary site wide external links.
You can see the performance of your website by yourself. The DA can be improved by having some good quality back links and by formatting Meta description in the correct form; we can resolve the other issues of your website. Your website will start to gain Google’s trust and then Google will allow the organic visitors to land on your website.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us,
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Regards
Mark wood
Digital Marketing expert.Website:- www.justclickrank.com
[contacts removed for privacy]
Disclaimer: We are not spammers. We found your email through manual effort. This is a one-time email and you may ask us to “remove” so we will delete your email from our list.
I know that all of the ‘errors’ listed in Mark’s spam are a complete nonsense. Rather than ‘playing dumb’ for the first few emails, this time I thought I’d ask him right away, why the numbers he quoted aren’t correct…
Hi Mark,
You say that my site’s loading speed isn’t good.
But Google’s Pagespeed Tool say it gets 100/100 on desktop and 94/100 on mobile!
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?utm_source=psi&utm_medium=redirect&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whychristmas.com%2FThat doesn’t seem to make sense!
You also say that the site’s DA is 28. But when I check it on moz.com it’s 64
Again, that doesn’t seem to make sense!
Please can you explain why there are these discrepancies?
Thanks.
The next day, I got a reply from a ‘Ben Cooper’ who was also using an @gmail address – this time with his name and the name of the company in it:
Hi James,
Appreciate your prompt response. This is Ben Cooper, Senior Business Consultant of Just Click.I understand your issue why both of our reports are different.
You are using a free tool for which you are getting the wrong result. If you have a paid tool like Semrush then you can check the right thing.
As we are a multinational company we are always using paid tools to get the correct result.
Feel free to write back to me if you have any queries or ask me if you are willing to get a better result.
Awaiting your earliest response.
More complete and utter rubbish! So I replied pointing out the rather large flaws in his statements:
Hi Ben,
Oh, so free tools aren’t any good then. Hmmm.
So this SEM Rush blog post about using the free Google PageSpeed tool is wrong?
https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-google-pagespeed-insights-score/If we do a test on PageSpeed for my site, it gets 100/100 on Desktop and 93/100 on mobile. That seems pretty good to me.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whychristmas.com%2F&form_factor=mobileIf we do the same test on your site, it gets 75/100 on Desktop but only 21/100 on mobile. That’s not so good is it?
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?utm_source=psi&utm_medium=redirect&url=https%3A%2F%2Fjustclickrank.com%2FAre you saying that Google’s own tool isn’t correct or accurate just because it’s free?
And as for Domain Authority, it was INVENTED by Moz and they let you check it for free. https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
I’ve just checked my site again and it’s still saying it’s 64: https://moz.com/domain-analysis?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whychristmas.com
I also checked your site, but it says there’s no data for it. That doesn’t seem very good. Is there something wrong with your site? https://moz.com/domain-analysis?site=https%3A%2F%2Fjustclickrank.com%2F
And again, are you saying the free tool FROM THE COMPANY THAT INVENTED THE MEASURE YOU QUOTED is wrong, just because it’s free?
In your initial email to me you also said “You can see the performance of your website by yourself”. I’ve done just that. And I’ve used the same tests on your site. It seems that my site is better than your one.
Please can you explain this?
Thanks.
That got me another reply, with more baseless (and incorrect) excuses:
James,
Appreciate your prompt response.Different tools always show different results in different locations.
That may differ IP wise.
As of our site, we are not working on our site because we are getting sales through paid promotions.
But if you need to optimize your site to get more Roi than I can do it for you at an affordable cost. Also, we are provind 100% guaranteed results.
feel free to write back to me if you have any queries
Awaiting your earliest response.
So we have a supposed SEO company admitting that they don’t care about their site. That’s a really bad thing on several levels… ‘Ben’ asked me to write back with any more queries – and I had some – so I did:
Hi Ben,
I’m sorry but “Different tools always show different results in different locations.” is total rubbish for PageSpeed and especially for the DA score.
PageSpeed measures REAL TIME performance from its own servers – an IP has nothing to do with that. (It can do if you use a tool like https://www.webpagetest.org/ where you choose your location for testing but NOT with PageSpeed!)
And your IP has NO EFFECT AT ALL on the Moz/DA checker – if you think it does, well hmmm.
So you’re not working on your site. Really? So you’re an SEO company that doesn’t care about their own site’s quality and ranking. Yikes.
You might be doing ‘paid promotions’ but you’re also a spammer.
I’ve been creating websites for over 20 years.
I reply to people who make claims about SEO to see what they say to try and get clients.
My site ranks VERY highly and gets well over 20 million page loads every year.
Can you tell me why you send out emails from random Gmail accounts to get business?
Can you tell me why you make claims on your emails which are untrue (which I’ve shown is the case)?
Can you tell me why you send out emails which break multiple privacy and anti-spam laws from around the world?
I do not wish to use your services. And I ask that you do not spam me again.
It’s been well over a week now I’ve not heard back after that one… Yet another SEO company that can’t answer some basic data privacy questions!
I’ll post an update if I ever do get a reply.
Their Report & Recommendations
Although I dealt with a couple of ‘errors’ in my emails with Mark & Ben, there were a few points left outstanding. So I’ll quickly explain why those are also wrong.
Your page loading speed is not good:
This was WRONG and was dealt with in the emails.
Your Domain Authority score is 28 out of 100
This was WRONG and was dealt with in the emails.
The titles are incorrect.
No they’re not. All the meta titles and HTML headings are very optimized on my site (unlike on their site as we’ll see below.)
Unique and optimized content is needed.
This is some vague it’s pretty much meaningless. It’s also rubbish as my site if full of nice and optimized content.
Need good search volume keywords in content plus text to HTML ratio alt attribute in the images.
More vagueness. But my site already has this.
Checking for unnecessary site wide external links.
This can be something to check. But my site is fine. It’s also something that imply needs to be checked – so how do they know it’s an ‘error’?!
So, like I said, all complete and utter rubbish on a standard SEO spam email template.
But let’s look at their site and see what it looks like…!
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://justclickrank.com/
For HTML Validation, my Christmas site has no errors. Their site has 47 errors and 6 warnings. Not a great start.
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 20 errors and 23 contrast errors. My Christmas site has no errors of either kind!
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 53
Accessibility: 74
Best Practices: 75
SEO: 75
My site gets:
Performance: 96
Accessibility: 100
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 100
So my site is better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’.
And from the email exchange, we’ve also seen that their site’s ranking is far worse (or non existent) on the factors they said my site was ‘bad’ for.
The code on their site is a complete mess. (It’s almost like they don’t care about it – oh wait…)
They’re got their ‘Heading 1’ tag around their logo. This used to be recommended 10-15 years ago but basically isn’t done now. But that’s not the worst thing about it by far. The alt text on their logo isn’t ‘Just Click’ – you know the name of their company, but is ‘Slider 1’.
THAT. IS. TERRIBLE. This SEO company, that wants to tell you how to run your site, have one of the main parts of SEO on their home page as ‘Slider 1’. It’s frankly almost unbelievably bad…
There are a lot of other amazingly basic HTML errors on their site. There are many, many links on their site that don’t work or do anything, including an email link in the header which isn’t a link, social media links in the footer which don’t go anywhere and links to their ‘popular post’ (which don’t exist as there’s no news/blog on the site).
The meta description tag is all about web templates and nothing to do with what they say they do later on the page. Again – WHAT?!
There’s no privacy policy on their site. That breaks several pieces of privacy legislation around the world like GDPR. And of course the whole “We’re not spamming” text at the bottom of their spam is completely worthless.
At the top of their home page is a slider (which isn’t very good for usability) and on it is a slide about web hosting. They say “host your sites on our exclusive, high-speed SwiftServer platform”. That statement is complete rubbish.
‘SwiftServer’ is a term used by A2 (a major hosting company) for technology used on some of their packages. Just Click uses A2 Hosting for their website. So I’m guessing that if you host your site with them, they’d put it on A2.
SwiftServer IS NOT their ‘exclusive’ platform. ANYONE can use it and you don’t need to Just Click to do so (and I’d say you’d be better not to – you can get much more space for less money directly with A2!).
On the home page there are two ‘testimonials’. Only one of them is written from the perspective of someone at Just Click (so that’s not a testimonial then); and the other includes the words “I like so much for the positive work cause.” which doesn’t make sense!
There’s no address on their site. On their about page, they say “Based in New York, Justclick has been serving an international clientele for the last 12 years.” and that they are an “organic SEO company in USA”. However, their domain was registered in Orissa/Odisha in East India. The capital of Odisha is Bhubaneswar, the home of many as SEO spammer we’ve dealt with… Their domain was also registered in June 2019. So less than three years ago. Hmmmm.
The second line on their about page actually seems to come from another SEO company in Bhubaneswar called SEOPhalanx (which was registered in May 2009). Double hmmmm.
In fact googling several other lines of text from the Just Click site, shows that much of the text seems to also be on the SEOPhalanx site! I’ve no idea if these companies are connected or not. But that’s triple hmmmm.
There’s only a US phone number on the site. It is for New York. But it’s also an area code which you can easily get a virtual number for.
The time which Mark spammed me would have been 6am in New York but mid afternoon in Bhubaneswar.
On their about page are three staff members. Only they’re not. Two of the three have photos next to them. But a reverse image search shows they’re stock photos of models. So they very much DO NOT work for Just Click… Quadruple hmmmm.
There is a ‘Terms and Conditions’ page on the site. All it basically says in the first point that that they want ‘at least 50% payment’ up front and that if you want a refund you have to contact them, you are “not authorized to directly claim chargeback” on your card – but that’s more rubbish. It’s normal to try and sort it out with a company first, but you can go straight to a chargeback if you want! Quintuple hmmmm!
Conclusion
Just Click are SEO spammers.
They send out spam, using templates with complete and utter rubbish on them.
When challenged, they come back with excuses that are simply wrong, don’t make sense – or both!
They admit that they don’t care about the quality of their own site – so why should anyone trust them to help with their site?!
Their own site is also full of very ‘hmmmm’ making things…
So if Just Click says your site has ‘errors’ and needs their help, the delete button might be the best option.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…