The Sapience Society

The following article is an opinion piece and should be read as such. This post is in no way a personal attack against the subject of this article or his/her company. This post’s purpose is to serve as a consumer alert for those who may be in the position of considering SEO work. All details herein are based on a single experience which occurred long enough in the past that the quotes and the order that the events took place may not be completely accurate.

Based on my experiences (accounted in full later on in this post) I would not do business with the company 1seoExperts for the following reasons. (The “SEO Expert” that I refer to herein is the same one listed at 1seoExperts)

1. Their lead SEO Expert does not seem to have a strong enough programming foundation to be effective at his job.
2. Their company outsources their web-development to countries such as (but not restricted to) China and India. This means less work for Americans, and that the quality of their work may be questionable.
3. Because they outsource web-development and the lead SEO Expert does not do much programming, the security of the sites that they work on may not be up to par with current standards.
4. Their lead SEO Expert has a very short temper and does not seem to act in a businesslike manor.

At no point in my visit was I asked to sign a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement, and the privacy of our conversation was never discussed. As such I feel it is my duty as a concerned consumer to report the following full re-accounting of my experiences meeting with the lead SEO Expert from 1seoExperts.

In order to avoid needless repetition of the phrase “the lead SEO Expert” I will now on call this individual “Michael Guy”. If requested, I would be happy to change this name in order to ensure privacy, but seeing as how this SEO Expert’s name is clearly given on their company homepage, their twitter account, linkedin account, articles, wikipedia, etc… I see no reason to refrain from the use of his name.

Several months ago I responded to a craigslist ad requesting assistance from a programmer who was interested in SEO. After several phone calls and an hour drive to his home/office in Sherwood OR, I met with Michael Guy from the company 1seoExperts to discuss whether I would be a good candidate for writing PHP for him. I had researched him and his company, and was excited to meet the man behind the legend. I had no clue that the meeting I was going in to would end with me feeling like I had just escaped a near death experience.

I knocked on the door several times but no one answered. After five or ten minutes I called their number and said I was at their door. His wife answered the door, she wasn’t terribly polite, but it looked like she had just woken up. She told me that I could have a seat in Michael’s office and that he would be down shortly. I made my way in to the office. Their house was cluttered and unorganized, “They just moved in” my mind tried to rationalize.

A few minutes later, Michael came in to the room. This was not the man I had seen in the pretty pictures on the internet. Michael was wearing a pair of slightly ripped and worn out jeans and a tee-shirt that looked like it hadn’t been in the wash any time recently. His face wasn’t the soft skinned one from the pictures, it was tough and leathery, scarred and old. The voice that spoke out was rough and gravely, a chain-smoker voice.

“Hey so you’re that hotshot PHP programmer huh?”, he said.

I thought he was joking around, so I laughed and responded “Yeah I guess.”

We sat down and he began explaining how one of his web sites was being inundated with spam form submissions, I suggested that…stop. Time for a smoke break. Out to the garage, where he bragged about various music equipment, he could have been speaking french and I would have understood him better. Back in the office, I continued my suggestion saying that modifying the .htaccess files might secure some of his form pages a bit better. He agreed and asked if I could do that while I was there, I said sure. Then he noticed some things that he didn’t like about the look of the page we were working on. An hour and a half later, after two smoke breaks and completely butchering the appearance of the page he was working on, I got around to suggesting that I might try to help him at this point.

“Oh yeah you want to go ahead and do that?” he said, as if unsure of how quickly I had said that I could do the work before.

“Yeah, I can do that but I think you’re probably going to have to do some other things to get it really secured and locked down becau…..” Michael cut me off.

“What? No you don’t understand, just do what we talked about and everything will be fine”, Michael injected.

“Yeah, we can start with that and it will help but it’s not going to solve the problem, becau…..”, Michael cut me off again.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, all these f**king stupid spammers out there don’t know sh*t, they’re just using some f**king script to do these submissions and if you do what you said then it will fix it.” Michael was raising his voice, and was obviously agitated. I was stumped though because it seemed to me like if he was so sure this would fix it, why hadn’t he thought of it himself? It was a very obvious fix even to a novice web developer.

Our discussion went downhill from there, I was trying to point out that simply isolating the form in some sort of protected folder wouldn’t solve the issue because as long as someone could come to the site and fill the form out, spammers could get to it too. We went back and forth, with him cutting me off at every chance possible. His voice was escalating, and I could tell he was getting angry.

Finally I said, “Look, just let me explain something really quick and you tell me what you think about it, I’m not trying to argue I just want to get my idea out there.”

“Fine, explain.” I started to talk, but was abruptly cut off, “Yes, you explain to me… the SEO Expert who’s been in this business for 15 f**king years. You the lowly developer explain to me… you explain to the guy who makes $10 million a year… you little developers are all the same, you think you’re so special, you think you know everything, you think you’re hot sh*t but you’re not. You’re just like the rest of them, you’re just a stupid little f**king coder and I know everything you know.” he was practically screaming.

I rocked back in my chair, as if reeling from a gun-shot. I was shocked. I stood up, and said “It’s obvious we could never work together” and I left. My heart was pounding and I actually felt afraid for my life. He never actually let me even say my idea, he was offended at the thought that I would even think about contradicting him.

It is only now after several months that I worked up the courage to write this post. It was a terrible experience, I was verbally assaulted at what was essentially an interview. I still feel threatened, enough that I’ve thought many times about suing him for emotional damages. I would be interested in reading any comments that you have to give to me. Do you think I should have posted this article? Do you think his actions were out of line?