I posted previously about why I do not think an SEO company should outsource its SEO services.
If you are an SEO I am sure you will get dozens of offers per week to outsource link building or complete SEO services. I personally think this could be a disastrous mistake for an SEO to make.
I recently had a couple of domains penalised by Google and I did kind of deserve it, I knew I was pushing my luck and I guess it got to the point where I pushed too far. This was obviously a stupid mistake on my behalf, but I know what I did wrong, I will work hard and fix the problem. I was also (probably) not do the same mistake again.
The problem when you outsource your SEO work to cheaper / offshore companies is that you quickly lose control of what exactly is going on with your site. It maybe reasonably easy to police the work that is done on-site but when it comes to things like link building by the time you realise the techniques the company is using are dubious it maybe too late.
From my experience the sort of link building techniques these companies use include
- Low quality directory submissions
- Low quality mass article syndication
- Blog spam
- Forum spam
- Buying up old domains and using them for link farms
- Digital Point Co-op
- Other cheap link sponsorship techniques
The problem with the above is that Google appear to becoming stricter and stricter with link building techniques. If you backlink profile increases dramatically and consists of low quality spammy links there is a serious risk of penalties being applied.
These companies often have little motivation to avoid these issues, if they get 500 clients they are not too bothered if 25% of these sites get penalised or dropped by Google, as long as they have a handful of successful clients for their testimonial then they are happy.
