Hi, hello everyone, I`m new to this Forum. I'm in a fix !!! I was approached by a dog grooming parlour with an existing but terribly designed site, and I produced a lovely site (their words), which was great on design, but apparently not on SEO. It did reach page 3 or 4 in the main search engine, but has now dissapeared off the radar altogether. I cautioned at the outset that good rankings would not be guaranteed, and never undertook to perform post launch SEO. Now, this person is alleging that the site is not fit for purpose, and seems to be running headlong towards a county court claim. Received a demand for a sum of money which is basically the cost of the site. There were no contracts, and I have out of goodwill made changes (prior to the nasty letter!). The spider results on the site are quite poor, but they can't have been all along otherwise how did it get on page 3? I am quite worried about this court case ... any ideas ?? Thank you!!

Hi, hello everyone, I`m new to this Forum. I'm in a fix !!! I was approached by a dog grooming parlour with an existing but terribly designed site, and I produced a lovely site (their words), which was great on design, but apparently not on SEO. It did reach page 3 or 4 in the main search engine, but has now dissapeared off the radar altogether. I cautioned at the outset that good rankings would not be guaranteed, and never undertook to perform post launch SEO. Now, this person is alleging that the site is not fit for purpose, and seems to be running headlong towards a county court claim. Received a demand for a sum of money which is basically the cost of the site. There were no contracts, and I have out of goodwill made changes (prior to the nasty letter!). The spider results on the site are quite poor, but they can't have been all along otherwise how did it get on page 3? I am quite worried about this court case ... any ideas ?? Thank you!!

consult a lawyer asap. If you walk into claims court without proper backing you can be done over. A lawyer will at least know what can / cant be claimed and can even settle out of court.

 

Dont go alone on this - legal advice is a MUST.

consult a lawyer asap. If you walk into claims court without proper backing you can be done over. A lawyer will at least know what can / cant be claimed and can even settle out of court.

 

Dont go alone on this - legal advice is a MUST.

 

Agreed, consult with a lawyer. You may not have to get them to actually represent you or anything, but get their advice first.

 

My own, non-lawyerly opinion would be that it depends on what was agreed and if there is documentation of some sort that shows the agreement. For example, you say that you advised this company that they may not get a good ranking - if you have emails, contract or some correspondence that verify this, I'd imagine this would help you no end.

 

Without documentation of the agreement, it's all a bit "he said, she said" - one person's word against another. They say the site isn't fit for purpose because of low SERPS, and you actually have a number of counter-arguments.. assuming the coding is indexable, then rankings will depend heavily on the content, which is the client's responsibility, unless you undertook the writing of content for them. That argument depends on the coding though.. and it may be hard to explain if you get a 'technologically challenged' judge.

 

Another argument you could use is that search engine rankings aren't the only factor involved in defining how good a site is. An example of this would be my old site, seed-design (now sadly defunct, as I'm starting with a different business model). After one of the more recent updates, it went from a PR4 to a PR0.. and it didn't make a lot of difference. The site was never built to be the only way a client could find me, it was more a support resource where I could send people who asked about what I did and wanted to see some work. So, unless your client wasn't going to use any other promotion/marketing methods alongside the website (eg, business cards, leaflets etc), the argument that 'low rankings=useless' falls down.

 

Anyway, I haven't seen the site, don't know all the details and -most importantly- I'm not a lawyer, but you could run those arguments by one and see if they'd be any use

 

Also managed to dig up some information on what to do if you're being taken to county court. There's some useful informational leaflets here.

I don't think they would have case though because you wasn't employed to do the SEO only the design. I'd tell'em to politly go jump from a moving train because the would have more chance platting p*** the getting their money back. You could send them an email recommending some good SEO companys... maybe get a couple of quotes together for them.

 

Can I ask how much you charged and just how much work you did do?

I don't think they would have case though because you wasn't employed to do the SEO only the design. I'd tell'em to politly go jump from a moving train because the would have more chance platting p*** the getting their money back. You could send them an email recommending some good SEO companys... maybe get a couple of quotes together for them.

 

Can I ask how much you charged and just how much work you did do?

and the small claims court knows the difference between seo, serps, webdesign , coding and the rest .... they dont. They see contract and any evidence to backup and support. Thats it. He needs to consult a lawyer asap.

Did you sign a contract with your client at all?

If you don't have a contract..... i'd say: "it wasn't me" (in a voice similar to shaggy's)

Thanks for your lengthy and considered replies. I think I will document this here. If nothing else it will be entertaining. Can't say it wasn't me because they paid by cheque ..£400. There was no contract. The non web-savvy judge is my biggest fear, along with high legal fees. I wish I dare copy/paste all of their e-mails to me here, but I can't compromise the case. I redesigned the whole site, 6 pages. It's a basic site... won't get any search engine excited, but would serve, as you say, a useful purpose combined with flyers, advertising etc. There is very little if any documentation, so it WILL be ...he said, he said ... which makes me doubt the benefit of a lawyer. If I lose the case I AM going to appeal.

 

 

I have searched and searched the web, and I can't find a single instance of a client claiming damages for low rankings (unless from Google) In some ways it's a shame it's not a test case (for the media interest), but it would kill me to give them any kind of publicity!

A lot of people flash about court action as a warning shot to scare people.

 

Don't be scared. I'm guessing your client knows very little about the web.

 

Why are they claiming it wasn't fit for purpose? Their whole argument seems to rely on the fact that the website was 'invisible' to search engines. Unless it was blocked by meta robots, robots.txt or a badly made framed site, then I don't see that this could be true. You said it was on page 3 or 4 - so it wasn't invisible. They say they liked the design - case closed.

 

Do you have any emails documenting that you said you wouldn't do SEO? Emails and letters are important if you have no contract. How did the sign off the site to say they liked it and would pay you?

 

The whole '80% of business comes from websites'..is a load of old tosh. Ignore that. It depends if you do internet marketing and how easy it is to sell online.

All the discussions were verbal. I fixed a computer for a friend of the site owner, mentioned I did a little web design, and it snowballed from there. He paid £200 as a retainer, and then signed off with the final payment. they were chuffed to bits, but it all seems to have gone sour when after a few months he could not find his site ANYWHERE on google. I admit the SEO was suboptimal, but at one time he got placings, and then they vanished. Part of my problem if it goes to court will be proving that it ever showed up on any search engine. I never anticipated having to prove that. Yes the 80% is laughable at his level.

Presumably they paid you once the site was completed? If so, I think that would indicate satisfaction with the end product. I'm not sure if they'd be applicable for a service industry, but there's an EU law that reuires a vendor to give a 7 day cooling off period where people can change their minds after paying for something, but if they contacted you expressing dissatisfaction outside of this period, then it's hard to see how they have a case.. They're saying the site doesn't rank highly enough in search results, but what IS "highly enough"? There's no agreement in place that defines that.. not everyone can be on page 1.

 

Unless you've done something spectacularly dumb like make every page an image map, I don't see how it could go against you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

please tell me you didn't make every page an image map...

Ok, scratch the bit about cooling off periods etc, I was writing it all before you posted

Sticky situation!

 

No search engine will ever guarantee that a site will be listed, or even stay listed, so the argument "fit for purpose" probably wouldn't stand up so long as long as you didn't make a pigs ear of it!. Also it's not uncommon for a site to disappear temporarily if page names have changed, especially if it's been taken offline while being rebuilt - it can take weeks or months for a site to be reindexed.

 

I see you did warn this person that site rankings might be affected - I always tell my clients this, especially when a site has a major overhaul.

Contracts or at least terms and conditions are great aren't they?!!! That's the thing you should learn from this.

Get a solicitor but I would say that, unless they can prove that you promised to optimise the site for search engines then they're talking crap. With no written agreements it might come down to a balance of probability - do you advertise that you do SEO anywhere or that you design sites that are search engine friendly?

As long as you haven't done something monumental like blocked robots or made such a hash of the coding as to make the content unspiderable then I would say it's highly unlikely you could be liable - SEO mostly depends on the content and how it is linked-in which they themselves would admit isn't your responsibility.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but unless they can prove negligence then they can't go for punitive damages and so your fee is the maximum - which, even if you somehow get landed with responsibility for the SEO wouldn't be the case... it would be a partial breach of contract. They themselves say they're happy with the design and only became unhappy later on when the site disappeared from the SERPS - partial breach.

Just my thoughts. Don't be too intimidated most people wouldn't bother with all the hassle just for £400. If you're worried then you could tell them it's a partial breach and, as a gesture of goodwill and with no admission of liability, offer them £100 - in these 'small cases' any sign of a reasonable offer goes down well with a judge and they'd not look favourably at having their time wasted by someone who rejects them. i.e. If the client rejects the £100 and it gets to court then, with no evidence on either side, the judge might just say "well the £100 sounds reasonable to me without proof - that's what you'll get and you can pay the costs too you greedy little pooper!".

I'm warming to the offer him £100 idea.... Thanks! Over to DAD .....The design was actually my son's - his first [and maybe last!!] venture into self employment as a web designer. He designed the site around images, with what he considered to be spiderable meta tags. Don't know all the ins-and outs of all this, so please indulge me. I have just now used meta tag anlyzer from linkvendor.com and the results were:

Title 16 words

Meta Description: 51 words

Meta Keywords 45 Words

Meta Robots 0

Meta Content language 0

Meta Author 0

Meta Content Type 0

Found Images 1

Linked Images 0

Number of words 49

HTTP status 200

 

I think the spiders just see the title, but at the moment my son has lost all control over the site. Passwords/username have been revoked by the client.

 

The client at maybe three months after launch, requested that my son copy into the metatags/description some words he had gleaned from a competitor's site ( I suppose on the assumption that this would raise the ranking) and he invited my son to discuss the sites problems (as he saw it) with a web designer contact of his (the man who actually hosts his site), who suggested embedding text in the images eg black text on black background. I wonder if this was the reason for the plummeting ranking? You can't fool around with the steering wheel, and then complain when the car goes of the road ....

If google saw that black text on a black background was being used, it could of seen this as key word spamming and penalised this site. Its just like adding a huge list of keywords at the bottom of a site, or loading up the alt tags with so many key words. It is known as keyword stuffing and google (and other search engines) frown on you doing this and will deem the site as untrustworthy.

 

But this is just speculation. As without being able to see the site or know what it looks like, or what it was like before it is hard to judge what went wrong where, and why it has dropped off searches.

 

 

As for the legal side of this it is harder to say, as it really depends on what was agreed upon as even if there wasn't a signed contract, emails and also the money changing hands could prove that there was an agreement to do work, and should the emails say exactly what you were doing for them that could help or not help your situation.

This is what we see when we right click and view source code:

 

<html>

<!-- Mirrored from www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.org/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [XR&CO'2007], Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:30

GMT -->

<head>

<meta name="Keywords" content=

 

plus many other lines that I have edited out ..

 

Would "Mirrored from" prevent the search engine spiders from indexing the site? It gets more complicated ...

Client had my son link several novel domain names with different keywords org, co.uk etc in an attempt to catch more traffic. He has just done a trace route [tracert] on two of these domains and they ultimately link to a server owned by the guy who is offering to fix the site for £400. Does this mean he has ripped/copied the original site to his own server, AND are we fooling ourselves into thinking the spiders can't index the site, when the reason is the content of line 1 above?

 

Contracts are the way to go in future. Thanks everyone for your kind input.

...who suggested embedding text in the images eg black text on black background. I wonder if this was the reason for the plummeting ranking?

 

That'll probably be it. Google penalises using that method (text being same colour as the background).

 

The 'mirrored from' bit makes it look as though they've used software to basically copy the site to another server. If the original is left up, this can also lower rankings - Google penalises duplicate content.

 

Like Dizi said, it's hard to say exactly why the search engine results have plummeted without actually seeing the sites, but I would imagine the above two reasons are largely to blame. Here's Google's own info on duplicate content, and hidden text and links

Thanks or your replies and links. Can't post the link for the site until this has been resolved, but I will do so at the conclusion! thanks again...

Hope all goes well, but as said without knowing whats go on here it's hard to say.

 

I've seen this first hand with a friend i worked with years ago, we just sent them a nice letter explaining SEO was not included in the agreement (no contract) wihich they agreed we didn't agree on a SEO action plan. So SEO was down to them as was content updating after the hand over (final payment). They nenver contacted us again, and the website is still what we designed lol.

 

I would say as long as the site is designed with all the standards and it validates then you've done your job if SEO was never agreed on.

It seems as though the customer has decided not to proceed with the threatened legal action, as it's been over 8 months now since we heard anything from them. Lessons to be learned (thanks for all your replies): Have a contract from the outset, explain how SEO is an art in itself and get em to sign to say you have explained!

Hello,

 

If you have to take something out of it, get a contract. Dont give up. If you dont fancy dealing with a client in this capacity again, then i would recommend working for someone else, and let them worry about it.

 

You can always point them in the direction of an SEO company if they ever come back.

 

Karl