WPromote.com www.wpromote.com A disagreement with an SEO company can result in them submitting negative reviews & false reports to search engines about your website the exact opposite of what you wanted El Segundo, California

We received an unsolicited call from a woman from WPromote.com to pitch their SEO (search engine optimization) services for our website.  We first found it strange that a company who claims to be #1 was making cold calls to recruit new business.  The woman did not seem to know much about SEO and it actually seemed like she was a beginner herself, who happened to just read something about SEO on the internet somewhere.  We are already familiar with the basics of SEO and this woman was not able to point out the SEO recommendations that we already know our website needs improvement on.  So she was either new, or just targeting people who are new to the internet.

To make a long story short, we ended up not hiring her and she did not take this very well.  Within days, there was a fraudulent complaint submitted to Google Adwords against our website (Google Adwords is Google's paid sponsored search which you see on the top and right-hand side of their search pages).  It was a complaint serious enough to have our Adwords account suspended and which to this date we are still trying to correct with Google. 

I will concede that at this time we are not 100% certain it was this woman from wpromote.com who submitted the complaint, but the timing and circumstances is just too coincidental not to be her.  In addition, we have no other complaints from anyone on the internet, including AdWords this was the only single complaint submitted and at the exact same time of our experience with this woman from wpromote.com.  And most people who do have a legitimate beef with a business dont know to go to Google AdWords.  Only someone in the SEO field would know to do this someone whose job it is to manage the Google AdWords accounts of other people.  Needless to say, this has been a nightmare for us because of the hassles involved in gathering and submitting our evidence and in addition there is a long waiting process and investigation period for Google.  If this situation escalates, wpromote.com be warned that the source of the complaint will be subpoenaed and your company as well as your employee will be liable for any lost income and defamation.

What I also found strange is that if you go to the wpromote.com website and look at their portfolio page, as of this date they dont list any clients and simply say to contact them to see their past work.  Most website companies HAVE an actual portfolio in their websites.  This is a red flag.  It suggests 2 things:  1) that wpromote.com feels that their relationships with their previous clients are poor enough to fear the risk of losing them to another company. (What is wpromote.com afraid theyre going to say?)  2) It also suggests that wpromote.com actively seeks new clients by looking at the portfolio pages of other website companies.

To be clear, I cant speak for anyone but this one woman.  Perhaps she is a bad apple in the company.  But after much experience with website service companies throughout the internet, Ive learned the following:

1) Be wary of businesses who claim to be the best (or as in wpromote.coms case, claim to be #1) but then see them make seemingly desperate cold calls (& see signs that suggest they solicit clients in the portfolio pages of other website companies) to get new business.  The same sign would also suggest they have unhappy past clients.  Most good businesses (let alone #1) with genuine knowledge & skill have business come to them by repeat business, referrals, word of mouth not the other way around where they are the ones chasing for clients.

2) Be wary of website companies who only seem to target people who dont know much about the internet - startup businesses as wpromote.com so tactfully calls them.  Theres a reason why they target these people, its because they themselves do not have a secure knowledge/skill of the topics, but just enough to fool people who are new to the internet.

3) The MOST IMPORTANT thing is TRUST.  When you hire people to work on your website, you are giving them more power than you might realize - they will have a grip on your means of livelihood.  With the click of a button they can do significant irreparable damage to you if they wanted to.  NEVER hire a company who would hire someone as vicious and vindictive enough to do such a thing either for something thats deserved or for something thats very petty as in our case.