We hired someone to handle SEO for our company. That person agreed to generate more traffic to our site, and build back links for us. The “expert” we hired went about generating traffic through spamming various blogs.
One of these blogs was the hpHosts blog, at http://hphosts.blogspot.com. The admin of that blog contacted our company to let us know the person we’d hired was spamming. A staff member at our company who did not have a full understanding of what SEO entails, and how white hat vs. black hat SEO works, responded on our behalf. He defended the spammer.
We fully recognize that our staff member responded inappropriately. Frontline is a respectable, family-owned business, and our reputation, the integrity of our work, and how we are perceived are incredibly important to us. That’s why we wanted to take the time to respond to the blog posting, and to publicly apologize to those who have been affected by this situation.
In attempt to rectify this situation, Frontline Telephone Answering service has taken the following steps:
· We acknowledge that spamming is an unethical and unacceptable way to generate traffic. We have ended our working relationship with the expert we hired to assist us with SEO, and are in the process of recovering the records of sites the spammer attempted to link to. Our relationship with the person we contracted has stopped, and so will any further spamming.
· We are reviewing internal policies in our company relative to PR and communication. We will go over policy changes with our staff to ensure a situation such as this is never poorly handled again.
· Our executives have hired experts to help consult with us about ethical ways of online marketing. We run extensive reference and work quality checks on these experts before hiring, and ensure that any expert we hire is willing to give us a “white hat” guarantee – meaning, he or she will use only ethical methods in order to generate traffic and get us higher in the rankings.
· We would like to publicly apologise to MysteryFCM at hpHosts blog. You were right to call us out, and we were wrong in mishandling complaints about the quality of the work done, and in how we monitored the person who was handling our SEO work.
If your blog has been spammed by someone claiming to be a representative of Frontline, please contact us at spam@frontlinecom.co.uk. We will do everything possible to make things right. We understand there are no excuses for the poor business practices that have happened here, and this has resulted in a hefty lesson for us.
To MysteryFCM, we apologise for wasting your time, as well as transgressing implicit rules of online conduct. We are a small, ethical business, and it’s upsetting to feel that we’ve hurt small businesses by allowing the spam to take place, and responding inappropriately once a staff member was notified.
Thank you so much for your time, and for bringing our focus back to where it should be – serving our customers with quality business solutions here in the UK.
Managing Director David Jones