Got burned by a bad SEO consultant in Denver last month - lost 3 months of rankings

I hired a guy who promised fast results with 'AI powered' optimization. Three weeks later my traffic dropped 40% and I found out he was keyword stuffing and spamming links from shady farms. Google manual action hit my site on March 15th and now I'm digging out of a hole. Cost me $2,500 upfront and probably 6 months of recovery time. Anyone else dealt with a fake SEO guru and had to fix the damage after?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_beth2d ago

Had a guy in Austin last year who charged me $1,800 for "local SEO dominance." He set up 50 Google My Business listings for my bakery from a single IP address. Google banned all of them plus my main one within two weeks. I lost every single review I had from 4 years of business. He just disappeared after I confronted him, changed his number and everything. Took me almost 8 months of submitting appeals and building real citations to get back on the map. These people know exactly how to game the system until it breaks and then they vanish.

ross.sean2d ago

At least yours came with AI, mine just charged me and ghosted after a 404 error page.