smart-traffic.co.uk review – not impressive
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Overview: £500 for 20 links.
One day I thought it would be worth checking out if these link building companies are worth the money at all. I wasn’t overly confident but I thought if I try it once and it works, I can keep repeating and if it is useless, then I’ll only have made the mistake once. Unfortunately that seemed to be the only option I had as asking for a review of such a company would return only glowing, obviously affiliated, reviews. It seems they make such a fat profit; they can afford to pay their affiliates £250 per sale.
I chose Smart Traffic because they were number 1 in Google for “SEO company” so they must know what they’re doing.
If I was going to test it, I might as well test it properly so I opted to pay £500 for 20 links to be built over a month. I assumed at this price they would be good quality links. I was pretty angry when I saw my bank statement and they had charged £575. Apparently they aren’t legally required to state the amount including VAT when they usually deal business to business. Still I’ve never dealt with anyone else that would omit such a detail. A pretty low sales tactic if you ask me.
My site was very new and targeting a pretty easy keyword “Timberland Work Boots”. Surely spending that much money in links will get me into the top 5 in Google at the very least I thought. They never told me where the links came from for some reason (well I assume to make it harder for people to see how crap they are) but I found them using backlink tools.
Here’s an example of one of the sites my link appears on www.tiesntags.co.uk. The homepage has a PR of 1. According to Google, the site has 93 pages. Most of those pages contain a couple of paragraphs of text then around 25 external links. A site with a homepage PR of 1 containing barely anything but hundreds of outbound links is going to be no good to anyone.
Here's the sort of links you'll be receiving. They don't look awful, but when you consider the site is mostly made up of these and has a PageRank of 1, it's useless.
And here's how you navigate to those pages. Obviously lots of pages with lots of links and barely any real content.
Even worse, I was offered “high quality” links where the link would be included as part of a review. Contextual links are much stronger links in general but with Smart Traffic they cost around 5 times as much and the links come from this same useless type of site. I’m glad I didn’t order any of them, but I feel sorry for anyone that has.
Let’s see how this “link building” work affected my search ranking. I had done no link building myself but since the keyword wasn’t competitive, I was already on page two in Google (proving it shouldn’t take much to get a high rank). Smart Traffic’s link building campaign began in at the start of May and lasted till the end of the month.
| 28-Apr | 29-Apr | 30-Apr | 04-May | 14-May | 18-May | 21-May | 23-May | 29-May |
| 18 | 20 | 17 | 26 | 35 | 27 | 10 | 25 | 58 |
| 01-Jun | 07-Jun | 11-Jun | 18-Jun | 20-Jun | 24-Jun | 28-Jun | 01-Jul | 03-Jul | |
| 55 | 179 | - | 102 | 194 | 151 | 156 | 154 | 95 |
There you can see that when Smart Traffic started link building for this keyword, my site’s ranking didn’t improve, in fact they dropped (apart from one day where they very briefly spiked). The month after, when the link building was completed, my rankings seemed to be severely punished.
Smart Traffic Conclusion
Save yourself time by burning £500 (plus VAT), then file a spam complaint with Google against your own website.
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[...] as they insisted the review has been removed from this website. You can now find the smart-traffic.co.uk review on a much more popular and high ranking website . You can rest assured that if Smart Traffic still [...]
I would be especially wary of their pay on results campaign. 20 variations of your most popular keywords in reality probably don’t get any traffic. I have tried one of their pay half now and half on results campaigns and with the keywords I ranked on the first page for I got less than 20 clicks per month, all were long tail.
The traffic figures they tell you you will get are an absolute lie. Everyone needs to be smart about their own SEO, don’t leave it in the hands of somebody else.
Unfortunately there are a lot of so called SEO firms confusing the marketplace with eroneous opinions and practices of what works to get better rankings. What we do know is that the most authoritative site does help in boosting the rankings for a firm’s content, but the rest look to be worthless for PR.
Most people think that the way to the top is to get links but that is only part of the process. My tests show that getting a few good links from sites with a high PR will be of greater benefit than getting hundreds of poor quality non relevant links, thus PR does not go up as you add more links from a lot of sites.
In fact, we believe that intentionally duplicating worthless links from sites that are not relevant to your firm’s business is entirely a waste of time and money and c’mon Google is not that stupid – they know what is going on.
Hope this helps.
I have had a horrendous experience with Smart Traffic. I signed up for a pay 1/2 now half on results package with an ETA of 3 months.
I had to chase up reports, the only time my account manager contacted me was for payment. It took so long I had to pay for other services that helped push the site to where it should have been. After 12 months Smart Traffic then decided to invoice me for the 2nd payment even though their work alone did not get me the rankings. When I pointed this out they were not interested and insisted that they had done extra work to get the site to where it was.
I asked to see the extra links but they refused and still insisted on payment and that the contract ensured I would have to pay. I said in that case I would need time to pay at which point they passed it straight to a debt collector. I have never dealt with such an unprofessional company with such a bully boy approach in my life.
The links suppied are extremely weak and unbelievably overpriced, they outsource their linking to the Phillipines, suffice to say that I will never want to have anything to do with them again.
Isn’t it funny that when a bad review is posted here a good one suddenly appears. I wish we had read through the whole of this site before we took them on.
We had a link building campaign and were sold highly relevant links to our niche. Imagine our horror when the links appeared on totally irelevant websites. Their argument was that the link were on a relevant page.
This is what they do. They have another part of the company http://www.free-seo-company.com they seek out websites and offer them 10 free links a month is they can have a link directory on the site. They then build pages on the site and put the links in place. Getting highly relevant links is not easy so this is how they work round it. If they had the directory on a website selling industrial cleaners but you baby food, they would build a baby food page on that site and low and behold they have now given you a relevant link. Wonderful, not, no page rank and no relevancy whatsoever in Google’s eyes.
Not only are they weak and irrelevant but unbelievably overpriced at £20 to £30 a link. All of their linking is outsourced anyway to India and Thailand as well as the Phillipines.
Be very wary is all I’d say.
Wish I had read this forum first before parting with my hard earned. Got sold on their 50/50 campaign and paid over £1,500 +vat for 60 Links. The Account Manager said that they would waive the remaining £1,500 if I requested more link building. It was steep but thought it would be worth it. I gave over funds for a further 120 links. After which I decided that was enough SEO work.
Serveral months passed blissfully by, (no business from the links btw), with no further contact between Smart Traffic and I. Imagine my surprise when I got presented with a bill from their Debt collection agency for over £ 7, 000.
Needless to say I told them to get stuffed and presented them with an email trail which never showed any such agreement and even an email thread between myself and the Sales manager who disagreed with his company’s demands.
They backed down but insisted I pay the remaining 50% (£1,500+vat) of their 50/50 campaign.
To shut them the hell up and get them off my back I suggested I pay them only £750+vat. They agreed. Now I’m reporting them to Trading Standards for mis-selling and seeking legal advice. NOBODY SHOULD THINK OF USING SMART TRAFFIC or SMART DIGITAL ONLINE.
They contacted our agency trying to sell us their white label system, so we could sell there links our customers. Over the past 3 weeks I have been finding more and more of their sites, but didn’t know who was running this network. I do now! Hello Mr Cutts have you seen this spreadsheet of 3,000 sites
Keep clear of this company; otherwise you will get in trouble and could find yourself in a worst possible than you are now.
The sad thing is, many of the small businesses using this service do not understand the risks. What is even worst, the SEO companies reselling these services do not care about these businesses. Business is tough enough as it is right now and having your website thrown out the engines is going to hurt. Trading standards are going to have a field day with this.
Hi Friends,
I don’t know why you are giving negative feedback to that loyal company, i have give lots of work to that and i am complete satisfied with their service and their work.
After their service almost 50%-60% my business increase.
Thanks smart traffic,
Regards,
Vineet
Shocking!! Sorry but this is discussing – smart traffic recently rang me wanting to sell “quality links” – after 2 mins talk with the owner Magnus – i had figured them out to be useless. but i work in link building and get calls like this all the time – so know how to smell a rat – bottom line and something to take away from this –
if you cannot see the links in advance – do not buy them. do not accept “test” examples either.
But either way – its a shame to see that these ppl are ripping off honest business owners for digital collateral
notably – their position one for seo company was delivered via greenlights network of backlinking websites – another search marketing company… not saying greenlights tactics are any better than smart traffic, but least they take you in the right direction and not down in this interim of google algo changes.
I am sorry to hear you have been ripped off – if you would like to have an appraisal done by my company – JLB – i can assure you we will take you in the right direction and we know what we are doing reg. dealing with these third party suppliers of links.
Anyway – thanks for publishing this piece I enjoyed the read i am sorry you got done over – i once had a client off epiphany solutions – another bunch of jokers! This time they took the client for £250,000 and delivered 10 converting ppl for that – Maybe it is time that SEO was regulated.
Cheers,
iDCx
I have spent tens of thousands with this lot only to find now my site is being punished by google and my site is loosing ranking for the key terms they worked on. The links were low quality and I now am needing to un do the damage – Our web site is suffering big time from this lot. And they only called me when they wanted paying. BE WARNED !
This company should be struck off from trading. Not only did they take a great deal of money from my company, over £8,000, and am looking a court demand for £4,000+ for work they have said was done after I dispensed of the service they give me in 2011 over £10k for what amounted to a complete waste of time. If you want your websites reputation kept in tack, AVOID THESE GUYS at all costs as you will only pay for poor quality links.I have also looked up information from Google and found the following referenceHowever, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources and the long-term impact that it will have on their sites. ((Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results)).
I have actually had to employ a leading SEO company to put all the work right that they did at further cost. Not forgetting that I had to pay Google’s PPC thousands more to get me visitors whilst these guys took my money.