I enlisted an offshore SEO company to find links for several of my sites.  The company is big and well respected, and boast about being totally white hat, so I gave them the job.

From the beginning things didn’t seem to be going quite above board.

Sure, there was a slow development of some one way links, which most web masters would be satisfied with, but, as I checked out a few of the links, I started to get worried. 

Oh yes, they were links on bona fide web sites, with good PR for the most part, but one of the links was clearly on a site that had no other purpose than to provide link space.  My link appeared in prime territory on the main index page of the site, then when I checked out other pages, I found that spaces were left for other sites to be linked to, and when I looked at the text – the content – I saw about 10 links to other sites.

So, obviously, this was a site they either owned for putting links on, or they were buying links from the site.

I raised the matter with them, but they never explained a thing about it,  just said they would send the links back for correction, but one month later they still weren’t corrected.

Then there was a lapse of about a month or two, and on my insistence they sent out another list of links as to where they had attained new links for my other two sites.

Well, I checked 2 links, a PR 0 and a PR4, the PR4 looked good, but there was no where to request a link from, which seemed a bit odd.

The PR0 link page – that also belonged on a PR4 domain – was extremely disturbing.  I knew this site, it was a competitor with one of my other sites, and I knew it’s two link pages, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to link to it – written badly, lousy content, just an affiliate site with no class.

It was disturbing at first because the link page my two sites appeared on I knew had been filled with links previously, but now it was just about 15 links, and mine was two of them.  If that wasn’t enough to raise my eyebrows, one of my sites had a nofollow tag on it, while the other didn’t.

You see, why bother putting a link to one of my sites up in the first place, to just hit it with a nofollow tag ? – why bother adding the link in the first place? – Where did all the other links go that were there before mine?

Am I paranoid?  Have I stumbled onto an SEO company in India, who wants more than to find white hat links for me? They want to own the whole internet?

Think about it, cheap labour to build and write web sites, US$ going in from people like me to build white hat links, they stick my links on their sites that they are making/made, but when I stop paying them to build links, I guess the links disappear that were already built, just like all those other sites vanished from the link page I knew well, and they have used my money to build more websites and to get more links for themselves by going after real links. 

So it ends in the position where the person trying to improve the serps of their web site, has been cheated of the links, and the India company’s web site competing with them takes the lead.

Most likely though, they are buying links, and are just profiteering, and obviously, when the money stops, the links drop off.