[JeremyMorgan]

This is exactly why I got out of SEO services. I always did quality, white hat, and ethical work and had a lot of great customers for a long time, and they started getting eaten up by these idiots. Basically the story would be:

1. I perform work for customer, they're satisfied. They would show improvement and start getting more traffic.

2. Some scam company company calls them and appeals to their sense of greed.

3. They tell me they're going with the new company who erases everything I did.

4. Six months or so later they call me back because things are worse and want me to fix it.

5. I refuse because now they're deep in black hat territory, and either deranked by Google or well on their way. Or they'd have some strange legal issues popping up from the crap the other company did.

So yeah, after a while I jumped out of the business. I know that isn't exactly relevant to your problem, but these companies are just complete scumbags in every sense of the word, and anything you can do to damage them, you should.

Call a lawyer, and protect your good name. Take a chunk out of the bad guys.

[jasonsync]

No matter how good the SEO ... someone will always tell your client it's horrible. And "prove it" with an SEO report card. And then no matter how much good you did, your client will always have that thought in the back of their mind that maybe it could be better.

Little do they realize it could be a lot worse.

Here's some of the crazy I see far too often:

- SEO guys that run paid traffic through their client's affiliate programs, to generate commission on top of the regular fees they charge.

- SEO guys that offer a short-term contract initially to reel clients in, use the initial fees to actually purchase products from said client's website, and then use perceived increase in performance and revenue to get a long-term contract paid up front, and then disappear.

- SEO guys that charge for plagiarized blog content.

- SEO guys that convince clients to pay thousands of dollars to add "meta keywords" tags.

- SEO guys that rewrite click farm traffic to make it look organic.

- SEO guys that install "backdoors" on their client's hosting accounts to continue monetizing the website via backlinks long after they've been "fired".

- SEO guys that hold businesses hostage with duplicate websites (similar to this story).

- SEO guys with english-as-a-second-language, that charge for "Content Marketing"

- SEO guys that charge their clients thousands of dollars to setup and maintain Facebook, Twitter, a Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, then do nothing on them for years and hold their clients hostage for additional fees when said clients realize they're not getting their money's worth and want account access.

- SEO guys that register the domain name and hosting on the "clients behalf"

[djur]

I encountered a variation of the 'backdoor' one. After the client commissioned a new website without his sleazy backlink farm hidden, he tried to convince the client that the new site would ruin their search engine rankings unless we put his scripts back on. When rebuffed, he started making wild claims about the new site being insecure (best example: "this nginx thing they use was made by RUSSIAN HACKERS!"). Didn't work out great for him.