The Problem With A-List SEO Agencies

1. Too much business
2. Leads to having to hire more people in a competitive industry where there are not enough skilled providers and a lot of churn from people jumping around trying to make more $
3. So you end up hiring inexperienced people and trying to train them on a “SEO system”
4. So now you’ve got a lot more overhead and your investors are impatient so you take any business that walks in the door and throw it over to the new kid
5. But the site is complicated – not like those 20 page websites he started doing SEO on as a teenager – so he logs into the company intranet and downloads the “How To Fix Panda SEO Problems”, cuts and pastes a client logo on the deck and hits the “send” button.
6. Client trusts the advice – Hey, they have a booth at SES so they must know what they’re doing right? – and proceeds to implement massive noindexing, nofollowing, blocking in robots.txt and link disavowal.
7. Organic traffic goes pretty much the way you would expect it to:
   

Many doctors kill a few patients along the way – that’s part of the way you learn after all – and there are plenty of great A-list SEO consultants, but sometimes the stories you hear are insane.