Now that Penguin and Panda are wreaking havoc with millions of websites, causing huge damage to businesses via rank suppression we're finding an untoward consequence to Google's enforcement actions - swarms of inexperienced, retail seos claiming to be penalty experts, exploiting the hardships suffered by penalty victims.
I chatted briefly with the market leader in penalty unwinds, Bob Sakayama, about issues surrounding the recent penalization of huge numbers of websites, and he told me a story that needs to be publicized regarding seo agencies claiming to have penalty expertise. He is currently representing a recent partnership with an enterprise that had hired LSF interative (Gearylsf.com) specifically to remediate a penalty.
After 6 weeks of this client asking for very specific help with a penalized and hacked site, Christopher Johnson of lsfinteractive.com (gearylsf.com) promised assistance, claiming skill sets that were never applied to the site in question. Although a hack and other major technical issues were identified prior to engagement, nothing was done in the first 2 weeks except additional sales proposals for link building (definitely not what you do to a penalized site) and content remedies (that do nothing for penalties). Also inappropriately, they pushed an additional proposal to further optimize another, non-performing site with no bearing on the business. Meanwhile, the client's penalized website continued to go unaddressed.
It took intervention by Bob before anything was done to address the server side issues, the hack, and the technical problems plaguing the site. The hack took Bob's team 1 day to remedy, and the site was technically restored by the 4th day along with the filing of the first reconsideration request. Contrast that with this fact: Documents written by Christopher Johnson shown to me reveal that lsfinteractive's strategy is to file for reconsideration after waiting 90 days! So if you hire these guys, you're going to stay in hell for at least 3 months, but probably much, much longer.
Geary LSF interactive extracted $7,000 in fees, and proposed optimization solutions which, in the opinion of the real experts, are completely inappropriate for a penalized site. And in the 2 weeks they had control, they did nothing. Once fired they are now arguing that the contract does not permit cancellation until $21,000 has been collected. This in spite of having done zero to mitigate the penalty.
The lsfinteractive.com players involved:
Chris Johnson, senior SEO manager
Jenna Allison, project manager
Dan Summers, SEO
Fumi Matsubara, sales
If your site is penalized, the recognized expert in this field strongly suggests you look for help somewhere other than lsfinteractive.com. So the public warning is: Beware of retail seos claiming to be penalty experts.
Jance Opty reports on search topics and white collar crime.