Heres a funny thing, we had a client that decided, for one reason or another, that after building his website and looking after him for a year that he would take his website into his own website hosting account and let a ‘friend’ work on it, despite our advice to him saying that he should be sure of what he was doing he moved it away, straight after that they removed our ‘website designer footer’ links from the website we created, here is the conversation that follows:
[Delicious Website Design] Was just looking at your website stats and noticed that your site has doubled the visitors since last month, think the main reason for that is your new pages have risen up in Google’s rankings. We see you have put the plug-ins on the site and changed some of the graphics and plugins, I think it looks good and has visually slightly improved on the original.
There are quite a few changes actually, have just noticed and some of them (SEO related) are not good in my opinion, and has undone some of the good that was already there, regardless am happy that you have gone your own way on this. If you want my advice im still happy to give it. Unfortunately it seem that our delicious webdesign links have disappeared from the footer of your pages, dont know if this is deliberate or accidental but would appreciate if you can put them back. If this is deliberate then I shall unfortunately take steps to remove your references / links on my sites. On balance you get much more SEO benefit from having these links. I would prefer for you to put my links back obviously. Happy to do this for you if you provide updated FTP details.
[ex-client] Thanks. This is the first stage of some changes I am making to the site. You will appreciate that I went my own way on this as we had a disappointing conversion of enquires to the site. Quite by chance I found out that I was losing email enquires to the non hyphenated URL of my website name. I have no idea whether one or a load of enquiries went through but the chap was certainly reluctant to sell me the URL , initially. Thankfully this has now been resolved.
I appreciate your offer of assistance, but am happy with the route I am now going down on the website and do realise that I may be going backwards initially to try and move things forward. I will be using some outside contractors for some of the bits I am doing, so probably best to remove my links etc from your sites. I hope business is good.
[Delicious Website Design] Sorry but it looks like you have fallen to a well worked scam I often get offered similar domain names for £100 and they say that they get email enquiries that are destined for my sites. They buy the site for £10 and sell it for £100 a nice profit, nowhere on your site was there mention of the un-hypenated version of your website so what he claims was definitely rubbish. But it is possible you added it incorrectly on a directory or another listing I guess ? If you had asked I would have told you about this well worked scam.
We now have 150 sites that we have built or promoted and nobody has removed their links from their sites like you have, almost sneakily, so bit shocked. Regardless of that this is business and I can’t afford to give your site a leg up when you have deliberately removed my links, what you have done is underhand and not right and I am sorry but I am far from happy with that.
[ex-client] I paid you to build me a website to provide approx 20 enquiries to me per month. I am now revamping my site and you have the cheek to say that you are not happy that I have removed links from my site to yours! This beggers belief. I am certainly not looking for a leg up from you. All I ever wanted was what I said I wanted at outset, which fell a long way short of what I was lead to believe I could expect from the site you built for me, with a complete blank brief to do as you please. Perhaps this could be seen as underhanded on your part James. Regarding the scam, I have met with the ifa who owned the URL. I have the emails.
You will have to explain the phrase “sneakily removed” and what is not right about removing links to your site from mine. I regard any content added or removed from my website as entirely my business.
Although not happy, I was prepared to write what you did off to experience as by your own admission the results achieved were poor.
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So how does this story end? I hear that the ex-client is moving into another business and looking at the website stats they have approximately 40% less website visitors than they did when we looked after their website.
