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There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. I

There was a time when, if you wanted to put a site online, you (or somebody that represented you) made a point of understanding everything that went into it. I've been making websites for 24 years. Making a website has always been quite hard, especially for a nontechnical user, and there has always been scammers happy to take their money. What's worse is that a lot of the time the scammers believe they're actually selling a good service. There have always been people happy to chuck any old rubbish up on a domain and call it a website, even if it was full of scammy links, stuffed keywords the same color as the background or in tiny text, with JS that overwrote your browser history and blocked the back button, with no context menu, etc etc. Its annoying, and sad, for those of us who care and consider ourselves professional. But it definitely wasn't any better years ago.

julianz 5y ago
True. A company we bought in the very early 2000's was paying $1000 a month to an SEO "expert". The expert hadn't noticed that the site had a robots.txt file that was excluding all search bots but was still happy to take their money and produce faked up reports about how busy they'd been pushing search terms around.
- zyemuzu 5y ago
  I have had two clients in two years that have had that exact issue. In both cases they were WordPress websites, my friend and I refer to them as 'WordPress Specials'. It is obscene considering the amount the clients originally paid, but it works well for me as the client immediately sees a dramatic jump in the SERPs as soon as the new site goes live, and that's before any of the general improvements in navigation, content and structure!