Overall Feedback:

This is a truthful and honest account of our experience and the reason why we can’t recommend Red Cow’s service to any prospective clients. This is our opinion and you are free to make up your own minds up. We engaged with Red Cow June of 2019 media to help us improve the visibility of allvanleasing.co.uk which was a domain that had little attention up to this point. They began with the usual audit and some on page changes for the first couple of months which we were pleased with. It was basic stuff but it was what the website needed. We started seeing some traction and had no reason to doubt their quality. However, things went sour quickly starting in September when they began to build links towards the website. Instantly, it became obvious that they were simply paying for guest posts with aggressive exact match anchor texts – an example can be found here: http://mahdi-news.com/audi-announces-driverless-goals-for-the-near-future/. For anyone who is even remotely clued in with SEO knows that these violate several of Google’s own link scheme policies (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en) which meant that as of today we have had to disavow pretty much every link they’ve built for us. A total waste of time and money on both sides and shocking to be honest. Immediately, we stopped being happy clients and became unhappy clients and we raised this issue straight away. We continued to get invoices but stopped getting work updates. At this point, Stephen McCance stepped in to defend Red Cow’s actions and to quote him “You can second guess work and links all day long, at the end of the day it's all subjective and opinion as to what is and isn't a good link.”. We felt that it was a bad link and they felt it was a good link. I have a document which can be made available to anyone with details of our complaints. So to be clear for any clients potentially wanting Red Cow to help with links – you may get poor links built towards your website that violate Google’s guidelines but Red Cow’s opinion matters more. If you disagree, tough. Pay the invoices. Like he has said, it is all subjective and a matter of opinion so if you feel the example link is good then you’re in luck, if not then do not use. Feel free to contact us for more example or simply plug the domain into ahrefs, Moz, Semrush etc and make your own mind up. What happened after this was perhaps the most abhorrent and cowardly act I have ever seen from a service provider of any type in all my years in the industry. Stephen decided that he did not want to speak with a paying client anymore, we were unhappy and he did not want to apologise or accept what we were saying. A quote from Stephen “I will not go into this any further, I will not be attending a meeting or spending any more time on it, Please settle the outstanding invoices, or we will be forced to proceed with legal action.” In our opinion, we had Red Cow bang to rights and they were forced to defend themselves to the point where they realised they couldn’t. It was impossible to defend the links they were building so long as the Google’s link guidelines existed. It was at this point where we were ‘happy’ to part ways. It seems good practice for a client and provider to be able to part ways amicably should a disagreement like this come up. Not for Stephen and Kelly. They wanted us to be unhappy and paying. At this point they had built two links in October (equally as bad as the previous) and we still have had no evidence of any other work being done. They had the cheek to invoice us for October, which we did not pay as we had no evidence of the complete work being done or the month end report. They proceeded by sending our account to a collections team and STILL failed to provide evidence of what they actually did for the money. Because of the lack of evidence of work we have had to assume they didn’t do the work because if they aren’t able to build poor links then what else could they possibly do? Nothing. Upon receiving the email from the collections company I asked Stephen: “Stephen, What work was done for this invoice? What is the time frame for the work and where can I see a report that this invoice would have covered? If you remember, I sent the last email to no response and you point blank refused to discuss the matter but now you want us to pay for the service? Please help me understand the situation “ I have yet to receive a reply which I am not surprised – the work was poor quality and they simply did not do the contracted hours. This has been an immensely regrettable experience, Red Cow have been the clear winners with limited efforts, all invoices (and then some) paid and they didn’t even need to all the work thanks to some clever wording in the contract. Their actions, we feel, leave a stain on the SEO industry and we hope that we can help potential clients ask some hard questions at the pitch process about how they plan on building links and how do they deal with disputes. We feel like both sides can learn a great deal from this experience. If you’d like more information please free to give us a call on 01565 880 880 or send us an email at [email protected].