A popular thread at HighRankings started by the owner of Gamer's Corner (who was right to seek SEO help) shows, in detail, how a poor quality SEO firm has "optimized" a website. They primarily changed the meta-tags (yeah, I know) and the title tags of the site's pages and it seems the SEs did not appreciate the new "over-optimized" pages and promptly dropped their rankings.
I particularly love this e-mail from the SEO company:
Hello I inform you that as the search enngine crwals the site also crawls depending upon the traffic generated. Its not your site there are thousands of sites crawl every day so this fluctation arises. It will almost take 90 to 120 days to get listed in major search engines according to the rules of search engines. I assure you once again that kindly be patience your site will be listed in search engines dont get panic.
There's a lot of good advice in the thread form HighRankings members, but what I take away from it, more than anything else, is how ignorant much of the site-owning population is about SEO. It would be great if a few media publications could help to clear things up with some high profile articles on what does and doesn't help/hurt in the SEs.
If early emails from the company were similar to this one - with all of the typos and poor wording - then the client should have known that he would receive substandard service. The error rate in this note suggests that about 1/2 of the title tags would have been crap.
LOL. Good call, EGOL.
I would never mess with the Title tag of the website if it is ranking higher already. Maybe alter a little but not too much.
Also changing the Title tag directly effects the ranking and an huge shift can be seen downwards if not properly written.
Even funnier is the large number of emails I receive soliciting to be my SEO company, when I am an SEO company. I reply to a few asking for pricing and how they could help me, just to see what they say, but I have never gotten a response back.
Bad English is always a giveaway, but any SEO company that needs to send email for business is most likely not a company you want to work with. The good SEO companies are too busy with client work to send junk email campaigns.
Still these types of solicitations are good for a laugh, too bad they pollute the system and make the honest and ethical SEOs look like shysters.