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We just recently encountered this-
Had an “ecomm SEO expert guru” guy with a decent X and LinkedIn following do a post to the tune of: “my former client left me for their PPC agency and now results are tanking…” Lots of nice SEMRush graphics and the like to “prove” his case.
We were the PPC agency.
The reality was:
1. He’d built a ton of spammy blog posts on an ecommerce site (mostly AI generated with little editing). They did provide a momentary lift on rankings/impressions/clicks.
2. He got their site a manual penalty in Dec 2024. Results of course tanked thereafter.
3. He appealed the penalty twice in six months before he got fired, after removing a bunch of the offending blog posts but doing little else.
Client was basically out whatever they’d paid him for a year of work, and were left with a manual penalty.
Of course, his screenshots and claims neglected to mention he was the cause of the massive downfall in results, and also failed to mention the spammy tactics that created the nice, momentary spike in traffic and ranking he was then claiming as his win. They also failed to mention the lazy approach to resolving the manual penalty (which didn’t work).
His posts are all red flags to anyone in the vertical – “How I generated $300k in 30 days for this ecomm brand…” type of stuff. But what shocked me was just how egregious his misrepresentation was. He literally was the cause of wiping out the client organic search for six months, took payment, did little to fix it, and then had the nerve to try and flip it into a positive for himself.
Blech.
