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Q: Is the SEO guy my company’s hiring a hack?
My boss is one of those types who rather listen to his inner circle friends than outsiders. Not only that, he’s ignorant as fuck (not even knowing what hosting is, thinking WordPress is the company’s “domain”…). When it comes to performing SEO, he only knows that (1) It’s “something that makes our website appear on the 1st page of google” and (2) It “needs a lot of contents, posts, images…”.
And since none of the employee know how to perform SEO, he asked some SEO guy in another company to help him. For the payment (as my boss said), whenever someone makes a purchase from our website, he’d receive 5% commission. The boss bragged to us that this guy was an expert he had to invite him to come all the way from the north to work here, and how our contents get ranked so (1st page google for some posts) quickly thanks to him.
Meanwhile, I’m skeptical as fuck for several reasons:
* While I’m not knowledgeable about SEO (I’m an in-house designer), I strongly think that he’s using black hat techniques.
* He uses a program named Money Robot to automatically builds back-links.
* Another boss (who’s my close friend) told me the truth that he had to move here because he had a hard time finding new clients during this pandemic.
* The boss asked him to “teach” me SEO, but all he did was instructing me to make new campaigns on that sketchy SEO program
* And maybe just my personal opinion, but I highly doubt who always asks loaded questions ( Isn’t doing this more effective? Isn’t this better?). It’s as if he wants people to agree with him even before they have a chance to check.
* No contract was signed because he “just wants to help”. Which means his responsibilities are also unclear.I wonder if my guess is correct or not, but this is how I feel toward this situation: I feel like this guy just wants to make quick money by preying on my boss ignorance. Using black hat techniques will make the site rank quickly (as my boss wants) but also receive long-term damage But by that time, not only he already received the money, there’s also nothing for us to grab him by the collar (no contract) and he can simply sate that “Google changes. And if he was so good, why would he have to come here? Maybe because he can’t no longer find new preys where he lives?
Once again, this is just my guts feeling but I’m not sure if I’m just being judgmental or not. So I make this post to ask for your opinion. What do you think?
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29 Replies
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Lol. He’s using money robot? I didn’t even read past that. Thats a black hat tool. He’s definitely not worth what he’s being paid and could hurt things in the long run.
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Eh, you might be right. But if it’s the owner’s inner circle you’re better off not prying. Even if it’s blackhat, that’s interesting experience to have and it’s not your head if it starts to backfire.
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I agree with IcicleDisaster. If you are correct, do you want to make your boss look like an idiot?
As for this guy’s record, are you tracking any of the results? You can’t say if he’s doing a good or bad job without any hard data. I just did a brief skim of moneybot and it creates web2.0 links, a common backlinking strategy used by many SEO companies. Some people consider this grey hat and others black hat. Technically, all link building strategies are blackhat including the ones that you might consider white hat.
It only really matters if Google decides to penalize you, which most likely will not happen. I know someone that’s been using web2.0 links for the last 15 years and they’ve received no penalty to this day. They did however, lose their top ranking spot because more competition moved in the area willing to pay for bigger budget links. Web2.0 only works in smaller less competitive markets.
If your guy is above average, he would be smart enough to direct the links to a domain that he controls before juicing up the money site. That way you can remove any future penalty.
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The moment there is software or a bot involved you know it’s Black Hat SEO, there is no “hack” about it, because once google sniffs out those dodgy links out (how? They look at what we call link velocity, the rate at which you are picking up links, and other stuff like where those links are coming from etc and can tell if it is unnatural )
Make sure you have installed and set up the Google Search Console for your website because very soon you will be getting a “special” message from Google about the black hat stuff he is doing. This, you can use to get him fired – but just warn your boss first to say, I believe this guy is doing SEO techniques that are banned by Google and Bing.
If he challenges you, asks him to take the Google webmaster guidelines and list what he has done for your company and either defend or acknowledge any violations! (Most like he won’t even bother and will just ignore and say he is sticking to The guidelines)
If Google are as smart as SEOs make them out to be, he won’t see any results soon which will lead to his downfall eventually
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It sounds like low-end blackhat work masquerading as SEO.
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I am a fulltime freelance SEO. I work for clients all over the world and have never had to move one inch for my job. It is a mystery to me why your guy had to ‘come all the way from the north’. If he has access to your website, GA, GSC, and any other tools you use such as AHREFS or SEMRush, then he has all he needs.
Instead of asking loaded questions, he should be doing a site audit to establish a baseline and see what needs to be done, explain the results of the site audit clearly, then make changes accordingly and show progress on monthly reports.
I have never heard of Money Robot but at a quick glance, it looks like a spammy PBN links builder which WILL backfire badly. Google has been hitting unnatural links and PBNs for years now.
You are right to doubt this cowboy. Guys like him are what gives good SEOs a bad name.
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Sounds like a churn and burn.
He’s going to spam your site with dodgy links in the hopes of ranking it quickly for a bunch of terms and he’ll collect his 5% commission until the website gets penalised and he’ll disappear.
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From my understanding of SEO, this is definitely a BlackHat technique. The more I learn about SEO, the more I realize that you have to approach a number of variables to make sure you rank on the first page. Somewhere down the line, the website is definitely gonna get flagged. Google is always on the lookout for such sites, so good luck to your boss if he wakes up the next morning with barely any traffic on his website.
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If he is using money robot then you will see the opposite results soon. //but learn that tool also at least you will get the idea and knowledge how you can rank the sites fast too. Even you can share the knowledge how to create the campaign on money robot with me as I didn’t have that knowledge 🙂
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In his defence, I would never “teach” someone SEO as your boss has asked him to. It’s taken me years to build my knowledge and expertise. I would not tell someone else how to do it.
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You are confronted to a Ass Hat. He is not a Black Hat SEO.
A Ass Hat will use techniques that put people’s jobs at risk. A Ass Hat will do Black Hat SEO unknowingly. A Ass Hat SEO will pretend to follow Google’s Guidelines while playing dirty in secret.
Stay away from a Ass Hat.
A true Black Hat SEO can’t be compared to a Ass Hat.
White Hat SEO doesn’t exist. Maybe it exists, but following Google’s Guidelines works for the Top 0.1% of the pyramid of content producers. The rest of us need some help to get results. -
This guy is going to tank your website (well your boss’). Best to see if there alternative jobs out there when your boss’ brand is put all the way in the back when Google finds out.
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Yikes. Guy probably is doing black hat stuff. Not signing a contract and using a suspect tool for backlink building are red flags to me. The conversational style of asking leading questions is a very old, very common sales technique. Manipulative? Absolutely. Black hat? Not necessarily. Just means the guy has sales experience.
I’d be more concerned about your boss. I’ve worked for multiple people that acted exactly like that over the years. It never ended well. Asking you to do shit way outside your job description, refusing to listen to advice from qualified sources, complete assurance in their own opinions instead of throwing out ideas once they’ve been proven not to work. That’s a nightmare.
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That guy needs to stop the money robot campaigns and be fired or let go ASAP. Money Robot has it’s place, but I’m guessing he’s just running it directly to your client’s website (which is NOT it’s place).
And if he’s teaching you SEO only by how to run that program and nothing on-page or technical SEO, that just shows you how very little he knows. What he’s doing is going to hurt the rankings eventually. Even if there is an initial boost.
Edit: Fixed some mobile typos/grammar 🙂
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Nothing straight wrong with using money robot or black hat techniques in my opinion, but it is dangerous. If the links made with money robot go to a pbn that is build with care and precautions, it will help, if the links are going straight to money site, it will hurt in the long run.
Check the new backlinks, and traffic sources to be sure.
“Black hat” are techniques that Google don’t like, most of the time because it makes their work more complicated, but also “white hat” only pushes websites to go straight to Google ads to be somehow in the first position, as long as you have the money to be there.
So in reality that works for someone is always grey.
Long term white hat is slow, and is not even secure, because everyone doing the same has the same chances. And then no one has any chance because if everyone optimize in the same way how could Google show relevant content?
That’s why backlinks are so important, and that’s why it depends a lot of how the software to build fast backlinks is used.
But you are mostly right, is very easy to fuckup with black hat SEO, and is hard to be unpenalized.
In your place I’ll learn about money robot, and look at boss reaction, and be clear in the risks to him, so he won’t blame you if everything explode.
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