Flash Web Designer Using Sneaky SEO Trick
I was angry, very angry when my ex-colleague asked me to take a look at his revamped website(www.ottegroup.com) done by some Flash web designers in Singapore.
Here’s snippets of what he said to me:
“I have finally received my new web pages but feel that it is really a bad choice with the web designer. He is using Flash and I cannot refer to any link or pages.”
“It looks good but not very functional.”
“Can you help me take a look and see how bad is the website?”
So, I looked at his website and got angry because it was beyond bad.
The Singapore web designer was so bad that I had to write this post to warn others from falling victim to such a bunch of sneaky & unethical Flash web designers.
Here’s a screen shot of the homepage of my ex-colleague’s web site:
I think, aesthetically, it looks good. However, look can be deceiving!
When I studied the HTML source of the web site, I discovered that it was a SEO nightmare.
Anyway, I usually give the web designers the benefits of doubt when it comes to SEO. And I thought, in this case, the web designer may be just ignorant of SEO. But, on further investigation, I realized that I was so wrong.
Web Designer Hijacked Client’s Site
The web designers at The Pinnacles Interactive - www.thepinnacles.com - did something really sneaky to my ex-colleague’s homepage. Instead of adding text about Ottegroup.com and the services it offers, they wrote copy to advertise and promote The Pinnacles Interactive web design services and added a link to their other website:
<a href="http://www.ochrepictures.com">Ochre Pictures Singapore - Media Production</a>
Here’s a screen shot of the HTML source of Ottegroup.com:
So, the web designer actually knew SEO and the importance of anchor text link (which in this case, his targeted keywords would be media production). It is quite apparent that the web designer at The Pinnacles Interactive has hijacked their client(my ex-colleague) web page for their own benefits.
Unethical Practice by The Pinnacle Interactive, Singapore
It was bad enough to use the client’s web page to promote own web design business; it would be totally and outright unethical for the web designer to mask all his client’s links using frame and only place their own link in the body of the client’s homepage for the search engine robots.
Are Singapore Web Designers All So Bad?
Such unethical practice will tarnish other legitimate Singapore web designers and affect reputation of the entire Web design industry in Singapore. The Pinnacles Interactive may be just one of the many black sheep.
If you have encountered with such unethical web designers in Singapore, please make a comment here so that unsuspecting Web site owners may be warned.
December 13th, 2007 at 8:09 am
This is out right unethical.
A lot of people/companies leave their website creation to a third party web designer without having the basic SEO & Web design knowledge, they could only accept whatever the designer delivers, and in this case, your friend suffered from being taken advantage of …… luckily he has you to check for him.
So, even if website creation is to be oursourced, one better equiped with the basic SEO skill and understanding.
I popped over to the designer website, the first thing that striked me was its Alexa ranking was more that 6,000,000, yet its Google PR was 3, it did not look right.
Of course, with your friend’s case, I do understand the reason and wonder how much PR juice has he stolen from all his assignment.
That fellow is really a Sucker!!!!!!! @#$%^&*!
December 13th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Hi CK,
Thank you for stopping by. I see you’re pissed off with unethical web designers too.
Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do to help my ex-colleague.
He probably has to pay the same web designer to get those text and link removed from his web page!
I know it sounded outrageous. That’s why I was so angry.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I do see these kind of things every now and then. There are those vendors who do sneaky stuff that are really invisible to the clients.
I guess I could set up an independent website audit service to help these people to make sure that their web vendors are doing a proper job.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I am astound by this unscrupulous web designer. Why do your friend pay them for remove their sneaky stuff. If I were your friend, I would demand them to remove their garbage immediately, and an apology to go with it. And never deal with them again.
I support Steven Yap’s idea of setting up an indepedent audit.
To all the website owner on this planet. You better learn how to view your source page. Or risk being ripped off by such unscrupulous web designers.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Hi Steven and TC,
Thank you for stopping by and contributing to the comments.
Steven, we can work on your idea of a Web site audit services. Maybe even an unofficial regulatory body for Web masters.
TC, if things were simple and straight forward, my ex-colleague wouldn’t have to spend several thousands of dollars to learn this lesson. I guess some crooks are so good in their trade that they can get away with their crimes.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Incidently I was also asked to help look at a friend’s website which is a normal salescopy selling his ebook. But the person who developed the salescopy/website was also damn dishonest by putting his testimonial there with a backlink to his own site! (and it doesn’t even open in a new window so basically a click on it will jump out of my friend’s website)
Fortunately, this is not flash and is easy for me to remove the hyperlink for him . Unfortunately this friend of mine still want to leave the testimonial there despite my my advise to remove the whole stupid testimonial altogether.
And this dishonest person I know some of you know him so I don’t want to publicly say it. For those interested can email me and I will tell you the URL of the website and you can see for yourself.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Hi Andy,
Long time no see!
Honest people like you are a rare breed.
For those who want to contact Andy to find out who’s that dishonest Internet marketer, please visit http://www.andyhun.com to locate his email there.
January 7th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
[...] other SEO blog and was pondering what to write at this blog. Then I saw an earlier post on how an unethical Web designer in Singapore hijacked his client’s Web page. So I did a quick search on Google for the unethical web [...]
January 16th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
IMO, flash prepared by 3rd party web dev people is just a sneaky way to promote vendor lock-in (unless they sent you the source-code).