People say “you get what you pay for”, but does it actually apply to digital products and to web development in particular? maybe these cheaper companies are able to produce the same level of results for much cheaper rates because of their lower salaries and costs? We decided to test it out.
We went to “Elance” one of the most popular arenas where these companies compete for business. And we commissioned search engine optimization for an inactive site of ours whose position on search engines and traffic didn’t make much difference to us. They asked for only $100 a month for their services and so we decided to give it a try for 3 months, which is a long enough time to evaluate their services. If this site’s rankings go up even a little bit; that would be worth every penny. We set the wheels in motion and completely forgot about this experiment. 3 months later, “Vaibhaw” our charming account manager calls me; in the middle of the night on Sunday might I add, to remind me that we need to pay for the next 3 months of their services. Monday morning we looked at the results and we were surprised. Not the good kind of surprised. We lost our rankings on all the keywords they were working on and for some of them we completely disappeared from Google’s top 200. Maybe they scammed us, we thought. Digging deeper into it we found that they were in fact working hard and putting many man-hours into the process but actually damaging this site’s reputation with search engines and the public, if there was a public for this dummy site. When performing external search engine optimization via link building an SEO professional will write favourable reviews and articles about the site he or she is promoting and link them back to the website. So not only all the reviews we’re in broken English with severe grammar and spelling errors, they also linked to this site from various questionable sites like Viagra, Russian brides, Casino and any kind of shady area you could think of. If it was a real company whose internet reputation and rankings were important, the damage would be almost irreversible. After all there’s a reason that these companies so cheap. Otherwise everybody would use them or all the North American web companies would outsource to them, but that isn’t the case.
