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I think I may have hired an SEO company that is hurting my business
Posted by on November 29, 2025 at 5:18 pmHello,
About 4 months back I hired an SEO company to help me establish rankings in my area. The guy has been really communicative and has seemed incredibly knowledgeable on what he is doing so I didnt have any concerns. A few days ago my web guy who handles my hosting and the one who built my site reached out to say he noticed a huge increase in backlinks and sent me a whole report that the strategy the SEO guy was using is toxic and needs to be stopped immediately. I forwarded the email to the SEO guy and he completely disavows the web guy. So basically I don't know who to believe and need a 3rd party who can really tell me whats going on. They clearly both want my SEO business but I am very concerned now because I am a small business and these dollars REALLY need to count. Is there a way someone could help me determine what the real story is?
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1 Reply
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Have you done your due diligence on the SEO company? Have you contracted previous clients for references?
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What kind of report are you getting? Is SEO guy buying backlinks? What else is he doing for the site? Feel free to send your website link.
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Your SEO guy does SEO and your web developer develops the website. I don’t see the issue. You already paid the SEO guy, so wait and see what happens . You need backlinks to rank, so I don’t see what’s wrong with him getting you backlinks ( unless they’re spammy backlinks ) .
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What strategy? And more importan: what do your traffic metrics say? Is it growing, declining, or stalled?
Also, FYl: usually the *’web guys’* (devs, hosting, or whatever) hate SEO people, sometimes with good reason. But in my pretty long experience, they rarely have any idea at all; as in, *”they completely ignore absolutely everything about SEO and rely on a YouTube video they watched 15 years ago.”*
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Where did you find the SEO company?
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You likely do not need to disavow back links. If Google thinks they’re bad, they will ignore them. Spend time disavowing if the links are clearly from bad neighborhoods but otherwise, spend time on building the type of content that answers your customers questions better than your competitors.
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Wait a month and see if you’re getting results.
With the tools available your ranking should drastically improve within the first month.
If they’re not using AI, it’s going to take literal months to get all the work done that needs to be.
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Your web developer shouldn’t be doing your SEO. Are your rankings climbing? That’s what I would recommend being the judge.
That said, your SEO guy shouldn’t just be buying links from an aggregator service every month.
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I hired a local SEO person and it was the biggest waste of money. I stopped using them a while ago and I still show up in the top 5 for searches in my business.
I will not spend money like that again.
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If this toxic report was from a third party such as Semrush, they haven’t got a clue what toxic means. Unless your SEO guy is purchasing backlinks do not disavow.
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Even if links don’t give value to your site, they very rarely harm it. So if your rankings are improving, you don’t need to worry about these links.
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