Responding to Spam: "Website Errors"
I recently received a "marketing email" from a company claiming that there were many site errors on our website www.StrategicSway.com. Typically these are a quick delete and I move on but I had to consider that someone may have actually taken the time to analyze the website and report back their detailed findings.
My concern is that our clients may receive similar emails if they happen to own their domain or have their email address on their website. This deeply concerns me because these claims by cold call spammers are potentially eroding trust and could lead to reputation decline; one less referral; or even a loss of a client. I've taken the time to publish this email and address each of their claims for your information and for SEO purposes.
The email and our responses in bold:
Dear
strategicsway.com Owner, Hope you are doing well. I am a digital media expert representing a very successful Silicon Valley based website design and SEO company. I have gone through your website , you have a amazing website by look but this website need more technical improvement for that you have to entering into SEO (search Engine Optimization) so that you will get more traffic as well as more business. Now i am going to underline all the errors which your website contain- 1. We suggest implementing HTML headings. ( H1 (0), H2 (0), H3 (0), H4 (0), H5 (0), H6 (0))
A. All of the sites we have built start with templates that include Headings.
2. Your websites ratio of text to HTML code is below 15%. We suggest adding a lot more text to your website. This is one of few relevant bullet points from this spam email. A lot of factors contribute to code exceeding text on a website. Our biggest contributors are using large images, white spaces and a general lack of text. We like to say things with as few words as possible because people don't like to read as much as web crawlers and Google do. Therefore we wrote this blog.
3. 12 images without ALT.
Guilty, a few of our images did lack alt text; this shows Google what an image is; some where just icons but still important. This was a good exercise to sure up the sites SEO.
4. Your page does not utilize Schema.org markup.
Helping search engines get to know your site. Schema.org is an advanced data mark up that tells search engines detailed information on what your content is about. Our sits with ecommerce are incorporated with Schema’s markup, helping search engines to pull information like product names or prices, and incorporate that info directly into the Search Result Page.
Schema powered rich result is supposed to expose more information about your page to visitors in search results such as reviews, phone number or location. Google guidelines require the information in the schema to be part of your page. If some of the information, included in your schema, doesn't appear in the page, it might not show in Google as a rich result.
You can check your structured data for errors here:
Our site tested with ZERO errors:
5. External link (Follow-4, No follow-5).
Well this is a lie; Currently, it is not possible to add NoFollow links to your site on the platform we use.
6. You should have a favicon.
All sites we have built have a favicon which is a tiny image file that appears near your url at the top of the web browser. In addition to that many of our sites have a Apple or Android specific icon file that appears on your phone if you save your site to your home screen. 7. Your website does not contain a robots.txt file. This can weaken your SEO. A robots.txt file is a set of instructions for search engines, listing URLs or files that should not be crawled or indexed.
Every single page we publish automatically generates a robots.txt file for every site
8. Your website does not contain an XML sitemap and that can weaken your SEO. Every site we publish has a XML sitemap and we connect the site to Google and submit them to
9. A canonical tag is set for this page, but it can't be reached. A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs
The platform we use has had this in place since 2010
10. You have not specified a language for your website. Our language on StrategicSway.com is set to English but if your site was built by Strategic Sway the set language doesn't really matter at all. If translation is enabled, your browser detects the language and offers to translate it.
11. This page does not have viewport meta tag or it has empty value. Probably, it will not look good on mobile devices and will get lower position in mobile search results.
The viewport meta tag controls how a site is displayed on a mobile device. When Google evaluates how well your site is optimized for mobile devices, it looks at the viewport configuration as a criteria for optimization. The platform we use has a different tag than Google considers to be a better option as it looks at the width of the device and uses it as the width of the page.
This can't be implemented in for technical reasons.
As Google prefers a different configuration our mobile sites lose points in the Google mobile friendliness tool when using this, however they still get a very good score.
To check your website for mobile friendliness visit:
I have a large professional team who can fix all the above issues immediately at an affordable price. I guarantee you will see a drastic change in your Google search ranking once these are fixed. If this is something you are interested in, and then allow me to share our Methodologies and Prices. Looking forward to your reply. Thanks & Regards,
Their email went on to say they could fix our issues for just $200 which is far-fetched for a company claiming to be based in Silicon Valley. We're based in West Leyden, NY which is north of Rome, NY and south of Watertown, NY. Why is that important. It isn't, but at least we aren't trying to impress. you with our location. If you are in need of digital marketing help please contact us for assistance.
Thanks for reading.
-Jared Sturtevant
@StrategicSway
@jksturtevant
