Warning: That cheap SEO agency cost me $3,200 and tanked my rankings

I hired a budget agency out of Phoenix for $800 a month, thought I was getting a steal. For 4 months they just spammed my site with garbage backlinks from PBNs and directory sites. My traffic actually dropped 60% after Google's March update hit. Now I'm paying a real firm $1,500 to clean up the mess and rebuild. Has anyone else dealt with link cleanup costs that eat up your whole budget?

2 comments

2 Comments

leobrown9d ago

Ha! You paid 800 bucks for a SEO agency and all you got was a free lesson in why cheap stuff costs more in the end. Sounds like they outsourced the work to a bot that just learned how to say "directory submission" and called it a day. That March update must have hit your site like a sledgehammer, I'm surprised you didn't lose rankings all the way to page 10. Good luck with the cleanup, hopefully that 1,500 firm doesn't also find a secret way to bill you for fixing their own mistakes. Its a rough game picking winners in this industry, sometimes you get what you pay for and sometimes you just get a headache.

charles5089d ago

Yeah that $800 was basically a donation to the "learn the hard way" fund. Hope the new firm actually knows what they're doing.