What I don't want, however, is to take the blame on a client project for shady tactics employed before we even worked on the project. Some time ago, at Distilled, we had an issue with this when a client had a website banned. We weren't to blame, but it was very bad timing - the course of events looked like this:
- Client (a pan-European brand) hires us as "outsourced SEO department" reporting to their chief marketing people
- We make recommendations regarding their main site
- Recommendations are implemented and traffic begins to rise
- Client buys a company with a well-known brand in one European country (SEO obviously falls under our remit since we are their SEO department)
- Shortly afterwards (and before our first recommendations), the website for the new brand gets banned...
Now, anyone who has worked with us will know that we typically look to improve the things directly under the client's control first - most decent size websites have link equity they aren't spending well and so technical and structural stuff is normally our first target. Many clients, unfortunately, still think we have magic buttons under our desks (or perhaps they're hoping we'll submit them to a few thousand search engines), and so it was perfectly plausible to them that even though we hadn't yet made any recommendations for their new site, we might have pushed the button under our desk a little hard and got them banned.
It might be how some SEO companies work - get a new client and plug them into your shady link network - but it's not our style. These kind of tactics might have their place, but in my opinion, that place is not when you're playing with brand websites.
So, once we had diagnosed the issue, calmed the client down, bullied the old firm to remove the network, submitted grovelling reinclusion requests etc., we started to think....
The nature of our business is such that many clients have implemented 'SEO' suggestions before (whether in-house or agency) and many of them have pasts that contain the odd closet with perhaps a skeleton or two. How could we avoid this kind of scenario in the future - where we might get the blame for the sins of our predecessors?
The Pre-Sales SEO Due Diligence
Out of this conversation came a concept that we have gone some way towards but not 100% cracked yet. This is the idea that before signing a new contract, we should undertake due diligence regarding previous tactics independently of quizzing our prospective client (not only are clients not always up-front about previous tactics, but personnel could have changed, external agencies could have been responsible without being straight with the in-house team, etc.).
So, we are now starting to look out for a variety of things that signal warnings to investigate more closely before signing with a given client. We are looking for things like:
- Manipulative patterns in their backlinks
- Cloaking
- Doorway pages
Pre-sales is not the only time that you might need to do this - sometimes you are going to be paid to do it. This happens when you are hired to work out what has gone wrong with a site when the owner can't help. They might not be able to help because either the board doesn't know details of what was done in the past and the team has moved on, the company purchased the site as a whole, or they outsourced SEO to a less-than-reputable source. As part of our global associate role with SEOmoz, we answer a lot of Q&A and this kind of diagnosis forms a fair bit of that work.
So, finally, I'm going to get to the point and present my methodology for diagnosing manipulative issues with websites:
Forensic SEO Process
I look for three main things:
- Generally deceptive on-site practices (keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, doorway pages)
- Cloaking or other unusual serving of information
- Offsite manipulation - strange linking patterns, etc.
- do a site: query and just see how many pages they have indexed versus the apparent size of the website
- search for some of their keywords across their site
- view the source of a few key pages
- check their internal linking structure
2. To check for cloaking, I typically change my Firefox user-agent to Googlebot, disable javascript and cookies and browse around a bit watching for different site behaviour. This isn't enough to pick up sophisticated cloaking but it gives a good overall impression. The ultimate check is to compare the Google cache of their pages to the originals. This is a bit more time-consuming, but is the only way I know of to pick up all kinds of cloaking.
3. The one that caught us out with our client was deceptive linking practices. In an attempt to spot that, I delve into their backlinks a little. What I'm looking for here is things like:
- Repeated optimised anchor text
- Sitewide links
- Links from many low quality sites (long, hyphenated URLS, blogspot domains, etc.)
- Footer / sponsored links
- Hidden / cloaked links
I'm interested to know whether this is part of your process and what tools, tips or tricks you use. Share all in the comments!
Wow Will, you probably just saved me a huge headache down the road. Researching previous SEO work wasn't even on my radar but it definitely should have been. I'm really interested too to hear what others are doing/using! Thanks for the good advice!
Good one Will! Link forensics has saved me countless times from new project nightmares. I wrote about link forensics in the print magazine Ad Age back in 2002, but back then called it link profiling. Forensics implies a death has ocurred, which in some cases is the best advice to give the client :), but link forensics can also unearth really useful data that can help the client redirect a bad strategy.
Great post Will,
I try to do as much preliminary ground work before hand as possible. I also do as much as I can on the top five in their verticle to see what we are up against.
I have a pretty good understanding of the link scheme you went over. I have a question though, I have run across some "link exchange" programs. Is there a way to find out if these are on the Big Brother radar? Lots of smaller businesses involved.
Anybody?
I'd never thought of this before. but this is definately a great idea. Researching a companies present seo results and problems would help when explaining stuff down the track.
thanks. good post
We are literally going through this with a decent client right now. Normally we do a little research before taking on a client, but in this case we went too fast and were not thorough enough. Lots of bad stuff took place before we signed them up.
We have a call with them next week to discuss the situation as the expectations are now way off.
How about looking at backlinks before buying a website? I would think that people do, but looking at the recent purchase of Bankaholic you can see that some dont care.
Thank you. Great article. It was referenced in #SEOchat on Twitter tonight.
Everytime I read great articles like this I can't help but think how much I still have to learn.
An SEO Newbe !
Thanks for the three main things which you focused in this blog. This is helpful for me I don't know before this techniques related to seo.
Hey Stu
glad to see a new member. Just another tip on SEO, you might want to read up on the "no follow" tag.
i love your report and especially cloaking, i found it bit hard to identify but now i know a process which you told in report i will try that, i some time try to spend bit more time on structure of the website as to me it is very important, i came across a client website which has very unique content but i was amazed to see some of very low quality and website using duplicate content were beating them in most of their target keyword, when i did analysis i found out that they have content very deep in their website and engine are not giving them that much attention and second the they distribute their content in too many pages (could be done in single page with more effective manner)
Will,
We fortunately learned this the hard way early on as well. We typically do a comprhensive review before we take on a client just to determine complexity level and pricing levels. While doing that for a client we discovered their site had been hijacked by a cloacking site and was linked to multiple bad neighborhoods.
While we were completing the analysis for a different reason, it sure alerted us to "blackhat" techniques that could certainly cause our client to get mad at us for work that someone else had done.
Good post and good reminder.
I pretty much do the same stuff when taking on a new client. On top of that I look for traces of previous work, since we have a few named agencies and persons in our part of the world that have a very bad reputation among the Googlers. We do not want our name involved with those guys. Sad but true.
Great article!
This is great advice, and as Marty Martin said, not something I have given much thought about.
I have a couple of questions: as a "pre-sales" activity, how long would you spend on this kind of review? Presumably it would get to a point where the time you're spending on it could be better used elsewhere.
Secondly, what do you do with the information you obtain from reviewing a site in such a way? Do you tell the client what you've found? Advise the length of time it may take to 'undo' some of these actions? Steer clear altogether?
I would appreciate people's thoughts on this.
Certainly gonna look after this more in the future!
Taking a good look at the Y!SE inlinks can be a nice way to 'pre-sample' a website. Large amounts of suspicious inlinks (possibly from 'SEO sites') can be a good indicator that more research than average is needed for this prospect.
Thanks Will, it just happened to me. I took a client without checking their spammy links. After a couple months of working with a site Google updated its algorithm and lowered the value of most links the site had and it lost PR and rankings. Of course I was blamed for it, until a week after I was able to figure out why this happened.
This was a big lesson for me, so first thing is to check to the Site's past.
Hi Will, great post and something that many SEOs seem to overlook when the promise of a shiny new contract comes along. Until, that is, they find themselves the blame of some other SEO's wrong doing.
Fortunately we have had a very detailed needs assesment/qustionairre that we have clients fill out that asks alot of the right questions. On top of that we provide, from what we have seen, THE most detailed and comprehensive site analysis, for free, to prospects that are serious. Its alot to give away, would probably cost a few thousand dollars from another professional SEO consultant, but it really builds value with the client and also helps us isolate and point out a number of issues their site(s) have.
But like you said, this practice is never 100% perfected and is something that for us constantly evolves as we experience new odd occurences with sites. That is really what keeps this job interesting and fun, things always change and there are always new things to learn or tactics to develop!
Oh yes, I forgot to mention the flip side of the coin. That when you have a client that starts to get a big spike in traffic/conversions after your SEO work that they attribute it to an off-line marketing campaign or some other type of marketing. Its never becuase of the great increases in rankings. Of course having proper analytics in place will help you make your case in this instance. But unfrotunately there is not always proper analytics setup and even if there is it still is sometimes not enough for the client.
Excellent Post definitely a subject that gets overlooked. Unfortunately I don’t have much to add in the way of your process, but I can suggest a tool (Link Diagnosis) that I know has saved me some time in the past.
To be perfectly honest this tool is far from the end all be all for checking backlinks. It requires a Firefox Extension to function, and lacks a lot of necessary information (i.e. Google PR, placement of link on the page, etc.) which ultimately means users end up doing some manual digging anyway, but it does offer an list of sites and anchor text which can be exported into excel. The information is derived from Y!SE so once you have it in Excel from its quite a bit easier to digest. Their url is https://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
Excellent post for any SEO company or person to keep in mined thanks again.
For internal linking structure, I find that looking at selected pages using Lynx View is a quick way to spot hidden links. (Faster and easier than View Source)
I use Right Lynx from Yellowpipe.
Not strictly about shady links, but on a related topic, we've been blindsided by clients who have mirrored sites, and duplicate or, ahem, "borrowed" content. Shortly after completing an SEO project for a client like this, their rankings fell way off and we discovered that it was just the SE's finally catching on to their bad behavior. They had very few backlinks and what they had seemed legit.
To uncover scrapers, mirrored sites and duplicate content, we always take a snippet of text that should be unique and do an exact quote search in Google. Even when you ask, some clients don't disclose additional URLs they own. In some cases they don't even know that they own multiple URLs or that they have mirrored sites. Or that their web developer scraped content.