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When Do We Turn Down a Prospective SEO Client?
June 27, 2006
Cab fare to nowhere is what you are
A white line to an exit sign is what you are
Or so begins a now-nearly-two-decades-old song by Paul Carrack, called "Don't Shed a Tear."
We received a Request for Proposal this week that caught our eye. The product and/or service offered by the site was extremely vague. The copy hinted around at an industry where we don't spend too much time. Here's why:
- A quick reverse-IP check (paid account req'd) showed 1160 other sites on this site's IP address. Not a big deal in today's world of shared virtual hosting, of course. Except that each of the sites is exactly the same. Same graphics. Same copy. Same Everything. The only difference was the domain names.
- All 1161 sites are hosted by a company that not only hosts sites, but offers a full "internet marketing solution" for all its hostees.
- A quick check of a random text string from the site shows the text duplicated across 14,600 sites at Google, and nearly 3000 at Yahoo. So it wasn't exactly written from scratch.
Sorry, but taking on this client would be a huge waste of her money and our time. This site network has more strikes against it than the Brooklyn Dodgers facing Don Larsen on that fateful day in 1956.
There's a very strong likelihood that the person who sent us the RFP has no idea how many sites are out there identical to hers. Or else she knows all too well, and she wants a leg up on (all 1160) of them. Either way, no thanks.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at June 27, 2006 12:05 PM
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Comments
Not good, I have had 3 clients like this so far this year.. though not all having the shared hosting problem, but having very similar sites with different domains on the same topic.. also a check against some text on their site also showed many sites with the same content in Google already
I don't know if this is a case of the site owner copying content or a bad SEO guy cheating people.. but I had to turn the clients down as well
Posted by: Jason Brown at June 27, 2006 2:29 PM
Some potential clients should be avoided for other reasons than their hosting enviornment. Businesses that burn through several SEO companies in a two or three year period are a sure sign of trouble ahead. I've went though a client like that and at the end of the day, I should not have accepted them in the first place.
In this case, it was not the hosting env, but rather the personalities, the decision making process and the business structure that was the real problem.
Posted by: Webmetricsguru at June 27, 2006 11:49 PM
This is a matter of business ethics and professionalism. And it's true. A lot of this situation is happening online. We just have to take on our own stand point and be polite to reject any offer that will have no good cause.
Posted by: Mary at August 9, 2006 8:58 PM
did you send that information to Google or sit on it?
Posted by: paisley at January 30, 2007 3:00 PM
Great post!
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