seo company foul play or normal bot behavior?

I did a back link check on a competitor site that is in the top 10 on Google. I reviewed some of the links their keywords were posted on and I made a shocking discovery. Before I started reading the BHW forum and doing offsite SEO myself I used to pay a SEO company to work on 2 different unrelated sites for me. Now when I checked the back links of this competitor site I noticed that the comments posted on the back links were using all the keywords I paid this seo company to work on and also the other project I paid the seo company to work on appeared on this back link comment too. I have confronted the company saying you are promoting competitor sites on purpose to push my clients websites down and they have replied saying

"theres bots taking other anchors and puting the same keywords. Its normal that bots repost content. Get used to bots reposting ur articles. I just tell u its pretty normal, theres bots that scrape other sites and replace links"

Click to expand...

I'd accept his argument but I can't make sense of the fact that these blog posts contain both unrelated campaigns. If it was just the one site and all its keywords in the blog comment I'd think OK its possible another seo company working on the same keywords for this competitor is trying to mimic what work has been done in the past for my client.

I did not renew the SEO contract with them so I think they are trying to push the sites down that I paid them to work on.. Am I paranoid? Is the explanation I got from them valid?

I just cant comprehend someone else setting up a bot to target the exact same keywords I gave exclusively to this seo company. What makes this even more suspicious is that both campaigns I gave to this company appear in the same blog comment.

Can the BHW shed some light on this? Do you think I am right to suspect foul play here or is it genuine a random bot decided to target the exact same campaigns I had created with this seo company?

Quite possible.

However it is also quite possible that your competitor has reverse engineered the backlinking strategy your SEO hire used and duplicated it. This is a common practice, copy your competitor's backlink campaign AND add some extra stuff and if onsite SEO is equal then logically you'll have the upper hand as you have everything they've got and more.

Anyways I'm not sure I understand 100% what you're saying:
These guys have the same links as you?
These guys are scraping your articles and posting them on your site?
??

So I don't really know.

Lets say the 2 clients sites are vvv.cats.com and vvv.spaceships.com and the keywords are cat toys, cat food, spaceship travel and spaceship cleaner.. I then paid a SEO company to work on these keywords for the 2 sites. When I reviewed the work the SEO company had done they were bunching the keywords in the same blog comment. When the SEO contract ran out I didn't renew it and sat back and watched.

I then decided to check the backlinks of some competitor sites yesterday (months later) and I found blog posts with the same keywords above but they were linking to competitor sites. I wouldn't find this alarming but because they are using 'cat toys' and 'spaceship cleaner' in the same blog comment but pointing them to other competitors I am inclined to think the SEO company I paid to boost my clients sites have decided to promote other websites in order to push my clients sites down because I didn't renew the contract.. Now is this me being paranoid? To me it looks like this seo company has gone out their way to purposely push my clients sites down or is their explanation in the post above valid?

I'd say you're right on the money, if they're in the same comment then its the same person and no way they've got two random niche sites same as yours targeting same keywords IMO.

As was said in someone else's post, the best way of doing this kind of SEO is to use a 301 redirect pointing to your site. They obviously didn't do this and are now trying to reverse the work they did previously by doing more unpaid work

Obviously these guys are dumber than dumb so it's probably a good thing you dumped them. Let's hope that they get fed up soon or get a new client

i had similar case. a competitor took all articles from my money making site and posted them to all article directories to make me a penalty for duplicate content.

if you are in some lucrative keywords like health, adult or loans it mighr be many people wanting your spot and researching how you rank. or even the company could make their own sites seeing how good money you made with them and trying to enter your business.

yeah dumber than dumber. hahah! they're doing unpaid work just to get your site down. lol. i don't really understand why seo providers want their former subscribers down, i mean they payed for the link you made in a month. lol. yeah, probably best to use 301 redirect.

Q. on 301, is it necessary to 301 websites that is related to subscribers website? or you can 301 any pr5 5yr domain to any niche sites?