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Can corporate/company digital employees prevent "black hat" search tactics from happening?
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- Brian Provost,
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I completely agree you can't prevent this type of nefarious link building scheme. But, link building schemes are a well known black hat tactic. When the stakes are this high, marketing or IT should have processes in place so that external links are reviewed in a routine, ongoing manner.
Blame the SEO firm if you like, but in the light of sky rocketing SEO results it's hard to imagine how questions about the tactics being used would not surface internally and problems addressed before Google gets involved.
For any B2C company of this size, this would seem to indicate some type of gap. Whether that's a matter of technical knowledge, management oversight, or ethics is anyone's guess. But, I would suspect in this case that blame goes beyond the SEO firm.
Good points. There is no way to have control of the Internet! However, someone picked the firm, selected seo terms, attended strategy presentations, and watched jcp seo skyrocket in little time. Ground rules and independent monitoring ( as you mentioned ) would have gone a long way in this situation.
Well it depends on how much you push them, if you say get results at any cost and are unreasonable you can expect something like this may happen.
Simple answer is NO they can't! You can't prevent this kind of tactic, all you can do is to monitor same, and then take actions should this occur. As an SEO practitioner for over 11 years now, it's an accepted fact of life....
:-(
Jim
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It's impossible to say it'll never happen under your watch. Obviously, when it comes to on-site tactics, you can restrict 3rd parties from placing and altering code or content. When things happen off-page, like in this example, all you can do is a) lay down the ground rules b) monitor independently of what the hired firm is telling you.
You simply can't stop a disingenuous entity, the one you hired or a nefarious competitor, from building links into your site. Plenty of competitive search marketplaces are rampant with SEO's buying crappy links and pointing them at competitor sites in an attempt to tank their backlink profile or make them look like link buyers. In fact, that happens more often than not. Take it as a form of flattery. If nobody is trying to tank you, you probably don't matter.
With respect to hired SEO firms, I can't tell you how many instances I've run across where the previous firm had bought a bunch of backlinks in an effort to make themselves look more magnanimous than the work effort that was prescribed in the statement of work signed off on by the client.
How do you monitor this? Get to know tools like Yahoo Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer, SEM Rush, Majestic SEO, etc. Even Google alerts. It's not hard to track your link profile, so watch anchor text and source domain patterns.
Hire top notch firms that don't need to screw around and then monitor religiously.