Greencowseo

[raph3988]

does anyone have any experience or feed back with this company?

http://www.greencowseo.com/

They are ranked # 2 for "seo company" but their website is only 8 months old and its already a PR7. Is this too good to be true?

Here is a link to their parent company:

http://www.ciplex.com/

[irvingw]

I see #1.

I also see shady links hidden in CSS on customer sites.It's only a matter of time before they get whacked for this by Google. I see their link in the code but not on the page, and of course the exact anchor text they are ranking so well for currently.

http://www.agorabudapest.hu/index.php/usefulinfo/budapest

<p class="<a class="attribute-value">dnn</a>">SEO By GCSEO <a href="[http://www.greencowseo.com/](view-source:http://www.greencowseo.com/)" title="<a class="attribute-value">SEO Services</a>">SEO Companya>p>

[RyanKent]

I have never heard of this company. After a brief review of their site, my advice is to stay away.

When reviewing an SEO company, I typically examine their site to see if they have any major SEO issues. If a SEO company has major issues on their own site, how will they manage your site? Of course, this logic can be faulty. You can have a great roofer whose own house has a leaky roof.

Some things I noticed immediately:

• the site has a logo, but the favicon is the default joomla favicon

• the site is duplicated in both the www and non-www domains. This is an SEO issue which simply should not happen on a live site.

• their backlink profile is very spammy. I would expect the site to be penalized either manually or experience Penguin issues. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=greencowseo.com%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=domain&group=0

• their logo file name is logo.png and there is no ALT text

• their address is 8383 Wilshire Blvd.Beverly Hills, CA 90211. If you Google the address it is an office building, but the website does not list any suite number. Seems suspicious.

• one of the URLs from their site: http://www.greencowseo.com/2-uncategorised?start=4\. This type of URL should not be seen on a live site.

• they have some complaints on the official Google forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/uYzKH4RWrIg/tnP_KXe28OcJ

• they claim to represent Dell, Toyota and numerous other high profile clients. There is absolutely zero evidence on the site to support their claim to represent these clients.

• the site lacks a privacy policy, which I believe violates some laws

• no signs of social media, BBB registration or anything to show there is any legitimacy to this company

I could go on....but the above should be more then sufficient.

[VentaMarketing]

I do not have any experience working with http://www.greencowseo.com/.

One thing I would always check when a website ranks so fast for such a competitive term is the website's back link profile. You can do that using a tool like opensiteexplorer.org.

It looks like they have almost 6,000 linking domains with the anchor text "seo company", over 3,000 with "seo" and almost 2,000 with "seo firm". The closest branded anchor text has 68 linking root domains, "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">http://www.greencowseo.com</a>".

[irvingw]

It will be interesting to see how long they remain on top

[CMC-SD]

Burrrrrrned.

[MattJanaway]

Great answer, Ryan. I started writing out a similar answer before reading yours - glad I checked before hitting the "post reply" button.

It really annoys me that sites like this even rank.

@Raphael Locsin - IMO, steer clear! There are some great SEO's on here and elsewhere who use ethical methods which will only help your business in the long run.

[MattJanaway]

Nice spot, Irving!

Disgusting behavior. It begs the bigger question of how the hell Google can let them rank in the first place whilst using methods like this.

[MattJanaway]

You have given me an idea for an article, thanks. I think I will monitor this one for a few months and see how it goes