SEO Cowboy Corner: The One Where Industry Pros Share the Worst Things They’ve Seen From Other SEOs and Agencies

I say this with great sadness in my heart, but I am morally compelled to say it nonetheless. I have worked in digital marketing and SEO for around nine years now. Before that, I worked in sales, and before that, in recruitment. Despite having worked in both SALES and RECRUITMENT, two of the most cowboy-driven industries known to humanity, I have never in my life experienced as much deception, bullsh*ttery, and cowboy-er-y (new word alert?!) as I have during my time in the marketing industry.

Turns out I’m not the only one. Who’d a thunk it?

The good news is, we’re not all bad apples. Some of us are, in fact, fantastic apples. Not only do we want your site to do well in search — like really well — but we are also out here sharing cautionary tales so you know exactly what to avoid in an SEO agency or contractor partnership.

Even if you’re not an SEO expert, by the end of this article, you will know what bad SEO practices to watch out for, what they mean to your business, and how to avoid the general cowboy-er-y of deceptive SEO ‘professionals.’

Psst, You Didn’t Hear It From Me But…

I’ve spoken to some of the best darn apples I know in SEO to bring you stories that will make you say, “WTF?” You just couldn’t make some of this bullsh*t up. Luckily, for me, I didn’t have to. (I’m creative, sure. But not THIS creative.) Anywho, strap in, we have a wild ride ahead of us. Oh, and to the SEOs among: Your therapy session is about to begin.

First up, we have SEO Specialist Jimmy Hartill. Jimmy, a self-confessed nerd and the proprietor of jimmyhartill.com, shares a tragically hilarious story with us about search engine subterfuge.

What This Means to Your Business

When I playfully called this “search engine subterfuge,” I wasn’t lying. This is an example of a spiteful competitor using deceptive SEO tactics (specifically link-building) to ruin your website’s reputation by associating it with explicit topics. And the worst part? You might be completely unaware that this is even happening to your site.

It’s not necessarily that this could do actual harm to your site from an SEO perspective, but it does demonstrate the lengths a force outside of your control (i.e, a competitor) might go to harm your website. It may also impact how your business appears in chatbots like ChatGPT. You might, for example, be cited negatively by the chatbot because of these kinds of spiteful spam attacks.

What You Can Do

The best offense against shady competitors is a good defense. Work with an SEO pro you can trust who will protect you from this kind of BS. You might consider someone well-versed in SEO, AI search, and reputation management.

Next, Marketing Manager Nick Reijmerink shares a skin-crawling compendium of some of the shadiest SEO practices he has encountered over the last eight-ish years in our industry.

What This Means to Your Business

A true compendium of SEO cowboy-er-y indeed. But I think the thread that runs through each of these stories is a digital marketing agency taking your money and, at best, doing the bare minimum, and at worst, doing absolutely nothing at all in exchange for it. If you feel like that isn’t fair, it’s because it isn’t.

Lazy. Shameless. Unethical. Complete BS. Period.

What You Can Do

Before you enter a working agreement with an SEO contractor or agency, I highly recommend grilling them (sorry, fellow professionals, but the good apples among you will agree, I’m sure) about how they report on their work. How often do they provide feedback to you, and will they present their findings in a way that doesn’t gatekeep critical information from you? Are they honest about when things are and aren’t working?

Former Tech SEO of 10 years, current AI and Marketing pro, the ever-hilarious, the ever-creative Liam Fallen of LinkedIn fame, dishes the dirt on a truly dastardly ‘Award Winning’ agency.

What This Means to Your Business

I have heard horror stories like this repeatedly about ‘award-winning’ marketing agencies. Case studies? Great. Demonstrable results? Also great. Glowing testimonials? Ah-mazing! But awards …Sometimes these marketing awards are ‘pay to play,’ and do not reflect the absolutely abysmal levels of deception, ethically devoid practices, and shoddy workmanship behind the agency.

What You Can Do

Do your due diligence and don’t believe everything you read — especially when it is someone else telling you how incredible they are without providing demonstrable results. Stay safe out there, folks.

Next, we have an anonymous source. I assure you that I trust them completely, but I will never reveal their identity. I just won’t do it! No matter how much you twist my arm… *faints dramatically* ok, ok, I’ll tell… it’s… JUST KIDDING. Let’s hear from ‘our’ Jane Doe, a Marketing Manager working in a digital agency.

What This Means to Your Business

You, as the owner of your website, should be able to make minor changes to it without jumping through hoops and incurring exorbitant fees from a third-party agency. Of course, some folks either don’t feel comfortable or simply don’t want to make changes and are happy to let an agency take full control. That is completely understandable, but you shouldn’t have that choice taken away from you completely.

A third-party should also not covertly (i.e., by placing hidden backlinks in your website’s code) or visibly use your website to add outbound links to their own or their other client’s sites without your consent. That first ‘covert’ tactic could actually land your website with a Google penalty, by the way! The second might not harm your site if the outbound links aren’t ‘spammy,’ but it is ethically wrong.

What You Can Do

Make sure your marketing or design agency gives you, as the website owner, appropriate permissions to your web property. I would also double-check that they don’t use your website to dump links to their other clients’ websites. In some cases, the websites or pages might be contextually relevant. In others, they might be spammy and self-serving. If you’re unsure, consider getting a second opinion from a different SEO professional.

With 20 years of experience in digital marketing, next up is industry veteran and owner of danlangrish.com, Dan Langrish. He shares an experience he’s seen happen three different times to three different sole proprietors.

What This Means to Your Business

In short, the ‘professionals’ you hire to build your website should — and this might seem a little left-field — build it so that it actually works?! A functioning website with contact forms that work and up-to-date, accurate phone numbers is the bare minimum you should expect in exchange for your money. Without this in place, anything you invest downstream related to SEO or PPC will be a waste of time, resources, and effort.

What You Can Do

Invest in a website that is built correctly and tailored to your business goals from the outset. It will likely cost you more than paying for something generic from a mass website firm or from a beginner offering to do your website at a low cost or for free. But I can almost guarantee that the money you waste via broken contact forms and incorrect contact details, and, thus, completely useless Google Ads and SEO work, will cost you more.

Now it’s time for me to tell you my own torrid tale…

I used to work for a small business primarily as an admin, but for two days a week, I did their marketing. I wanted to add a single service page to the website… a single page… just one. And whatever I tried, it never went ‘live.’

I also did freelance marketing for one of the company directors’ friends, who was a self-employed therapist. I experienced the same issue when I tried to add a service page to her website. She used the same design agency… Now I was really starting to get suspicious.

BOTH businesses spoke to this agency about the site issues, and they kept getting given the runaround. They told me what the agency had said (their excuse, basically), and it didn’t make sense at all.

After this, I spoke to the web design agency myself and started asking them questions: speaking their language. And they finally had to admit it was all about user permissions. The agency had basically locked down the website’s permissions so only THEY could add pages that weren’t blog posts.

The agency was only ever questioned about this because I started troubleshooting and trying to fix the issue myself on two of the websites they had built. (Small town, small world, and word travels!)

The worst part about the whole thing was that the therapist who I freelanced with at the time was not tech-savvy at all. Anything tech-related with her business made her really nervous. And the web design agency completely preyed on her fear! I don’t even want to know what they’d charge for adding a page, because from what I saw, they weren’t cheap.

What This Means to Your Business

I can kind of understand locking down web permissions from one perspective. As a web design agency, you don’t want someone massively messing up a website by tinkering in the backend when they don’t know what they’re doing. But for very simple changes like adding a page, this approach is completely unreasonable. In the example above, the clients should have been able to add pages to their own website.

What You Can Do

Before any work begins, or anything is signed, I would ask how the website design agency sets user permissions. And even if you would prefer a third-party to handle the work, it’s still worth having admin rights to your own website. You might need to hand over that website to another third party in the future. The last thing you need is to feel like you’re being held hostage for a website that you paid good money for!

Zoe Ashbridge is an SEO legend, garnering nearly 40,000 followers on LinkedIn. Pair that with having written for marketing publications such as HubSpot, Moz, and Search Engine Land: when Zoe speaks about SEO, we listen. Here are two of her worst stories about cowboys in the search industry.

What This Means to Your Business

Again, I think the issue here comes down to deceptive reporting, with the most underhanded lie being the failure to differentiate between brand keywords (people finding you through your brand name) and non-brand keywords (searches that can actually be attributed to SEO efforts).

Sadly, the other “inflated metrics” referenced here might be harder for a non-expert to spot. But I can tell you now that it is completely unethical to count a contact page view as a conversion, let alone inflate traffic analytics to this degree.

What You Can Do

To get the most out of your marketing, you need a clear picture of what exactly is working and what isn’t. Otherwise, you can’t build upon the good and improve the bad. So before working with an SEO contractor or agency, ask them about how they report on their work. In this case, ask whether they filter out brand keywords when reporting on traffic, clicks, and revenue.

As for the other deceptive reporting methods, if you’re already working with a third-party SEO resource and you’re unsure about how genuine the reporting is, it might be worth asking another SEO specialist to investigate any suspected issues for you.

Next up: SEO Strategist Ana Maria Fuček, who helps brands in the events, sustainability, luxury, and creative industries, shares two examples of bad practices she has witnessed from marketing agencies.

What This Means to Your Business

Programmatic SEO is essentially automated content production. Folks who practice this use website templates and databases of information to produce hundreds or thousands of search-optimized web pages at once. Sounds both cost and time-efficient, right? Well, it kind of is. But more often than not, programmatic SEO works… until it doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen programmatic SEO campaigns that absolutely make sense in the context they’re being used within, and they absolutely drive results within that specific context. An agency knowingly taking your money and reverting 200 identical pages, though? That is NOT OK. It won’t benefit your website, and it may even land you a manual penalty under Google’s spam policies. (If you’d like to learn more, Ctrl F “scaled content abuse.”)

I think Ana’s second story is pretty self-explanatory. Imagine paying a marketing agency to help you get more leads, only for them to hold those leads hostage through an ex-employee’s inactive email address? Ooof.

What You Can Do

What I’m about to say next regarding programmatic SEO might be annoying to some other people in my industry. I’m going to say it anyway, of course. The chances are that if you’re a sole proprietor or a small to medium enterprise, programmatic SEO would be overkill for your website strategy.

Maaaybe, maybeee, if you’re in e-commerce it could bear fruit, but because it takes a high level of skill and good judgment to pull off and is one of the most abused tactics by SEO cowboys, I would say it’s safer to avoid it, honestly. If you’re considering working with an SEO contractor or agency, ask them their take on programmatic SEO to get a read on their approach.

On Ana’s second story, and this relates to Dan’s story from earlier, too, before working with a third-party, ask them how they set up their lead capture forms. Make sure you know that the forms will be linked to an email address you can actually access.

Last, but not least, the owner himself. Steven de Brueys, owner of WTF SEO, closes us out with the story of a website that was alive to humans and dead to Google, and an agency that kept that little detail to themselves for half a year.

What This Means to Your Business

Here’s the breakdown for this, because this can, understandably, be a little confusing. The homepage was returning a 404 status code and then redirecting visitors with a client-side redirect (a meta refresh or JavaScript) instead of a proper server-side 301. This technical error created two different realities. Browsers follow the redirect, so every person who visited saw a working site. Google trusts the status code, and the status code said the page didn’t exist. A homepage that keeps returning 404 gets dropped from Google’s search index, and because your homepage is usually your strongest page, the main hub all of your site’s authority flows through, the whole domain drops all rankings with it.

The overall mistake is forgivable. It happens and no one is perfect. Botched redirects are one of the most common technical SEO errors out there. That’s just a Sunday-Monday in web development tbh. “We broke it and we’re working on it” is a simple sentence any decent agency should be able to say. But telling a client, “It’s fixed” for six months, while it wasn’t, and while Google Search Console was actively flagging the dead homepage the entire time? The overall error isn’t the offense, but the cover-up sure as f*** is, especially when the client is paying them the whole time this is happening while thinking everything is fine.

What You Can Do

Two things, and neither of the things requires any technical skill. First off, and this echoes the admin-access lesson from earlier, own your own Google Search Console property. It’s free, it’s yours, and your agency should be granted access to your property, not the other way around. Search Console is where Google itself tells you about problems like this, in plain (ish) English, the whole time they’re happening.

Secondly and lastly, when an agency tells you something is fixed, ask them to show you. Don’t let them just tell you. For an issue like this one, verification is a free online status checker or the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which literally takes seconds to verify. If the only evidence you’re ever offered is, “Hey it’s fixed, you’re good” then get on a free site checker or on your Google Search Console.

The Rap Sheet: 9 Red Flags in One Place

Nine stories, nine offenses. If you spot any of these while vetting (or already working with) an SEO or web agency, consider it your cue to start asking harder questions.

• Nobody’s watching your backlink profile. Spam attacks can associate your site with topics you’d never touch — and you’d never know it’s happening.
• You’re paying, but you can’t see the work. No reports, no feedback, no visible activity on the site. Money in, nothing out.
• “Award-winning” is the main proof point. Case studies and demonstrable results beat pay-to-play trophies every time.
• You don’t have admin access to your own website. If simple changes come with a support ticket and an invoice, that’s ransom money.
• Ads run with no conversion tracking and no reports. And the account is vendor-locked, so you can’t even check for yourself.
• Permissions are locked down “for your own protection.” Preying on your tech fear is a business model for some agencies. Don’t fund it.
• Reports never separate brand from non-brand keywords. People searching your business name isn’t SEO success — that’s your reputation doing the work.
• Hundreds of pages, one recycled block of content. Bonus offense: lead forms pointing at an inbox nobody checks.
• “It’s fixed” comes with nothing you can verify. A real fix survives a ten-second status check. Own your Search Console property and look for yourself — if the only evidence is their word, that’s not evidence.

WTF SEO: Trusted by Clients for Over 15 Years

Phew! We made it. Hopefully, these SEO horror stories were as entertaining for you as they were horrifying for me to put down on paper. 😭

Anyway, now we’ve reached the end of the line, you might be wondering what the biggest ‘hack’ is to avoiding these SEO cowboys. It’s not a hack as such; it’s simply working with a contractor or agency from the outset who is trustworthy, hardworking, and wants to do a good job! Take it from me, this combination of traits is actually harder to come by than you might think. That said, everyone who has contributed a story to this piece has them by the bucketload.

If you’re a small business in New Orleans, though, we’d personally love to help you out. WTF SEO is a New Orleans-based digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, AI Search, content strategy, lead-gen, and web development. We are tried, trusted, and true… of course, we would say that, but luckily for us, our client retention rate, results, and testimonials reflect that statement, too.