“So how about you get your SEO agency email me a private apology and we’ll let it lie at that?”

Excellent point Scott that would be a face saving move for Jobsite.co.uk and a real smack in the teeth for the newbie company that they employed. I like it!

That guy who did all this really gets around – he seems to roam around SEO agencies doing crazy shit to big brand campaigns with absolutely no controls in place whatsoever! Maybe he was the same guy who did silly stuff to the BigMouthMedia site that got them banned from Google? I seem to recall them using the same excuse!

Hell, he’s even been submitting made for SEO articles to ezines and the like. Fair play – I’ve never met an individual who would even consider link dropping on forums or writing articles with keyword rich deep links before they knew what SEO was. Perhaps your SEO agency should have kept him on board – he seems to be ahead of the curve in some respects!

Odd that he’s dissapeared a week after he did all this stuff, but before you or your agency found out what he was doing though. It would seem to me that if your agency had any employee exiting the company there would have been some kind of handover – particularly given this bright young new start was instantly given resposibility for link building for a big brand campaign.

Am I tired being sarcastic yet? Possibly.

OK sarcasm aside for a minute…

I know you didn’t intend any harm with the spam – this blog post was just intended to serve as an example of how link whoring can have a negative impact on marketing.

The one thing that still bothers me is that I don’t see any apology for wasting my time and the time of my moderators. I know this isn’t Gary’s fault and in fairness he did respond quickly and eloquently. So how about you get your SEO agency email me a private apology and we’ll let it lie at that?

Scott

Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention.

We have been working with a reputable agency to improve our search performance. Both the agency and ourselves take an ethical approach to our search marketing and by no means condone spamming. We have been adamant about this throughout our 12 years in search.

We have investigated how this could happen and the agency has confirmed that this was a one-off incident by an inexperienced member of their team, who has since left the company.

The individual was not asked to take this approach by ourselves or his employers and simply made a poor, uninformed choice. The agency is currently retracing his steps to ensure all such posts are removed on the small number of forums this may affect.

Thank you for the time you have spent removing these errant posts. Whilst we’re endeavouring to remove all such entries ourselves, should you find any spam posts bearing our name, we would appreciate it if you would alert us to any we missed.

Thanks for your time and efforts,

Gary Robinson

Jobsite Marketing Manager