SEO client refusing to pay. What to do?

Sign up with PrePaid Legal. They have a few different plans, they range from $17/mo. (basic individual plan) -$125/mo. (business plan). You'll be able to have an attorney send him a threatening letter, it's not a guarantee that he'll pay but it may scare him enough to make him send you your money. I've used them a few times in the past and it worked out well (I have the $17/mo. plan). The have attorneys nationwide.

No, I'm not an affiliate of theirs.
 
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if your gonna do damage, at least call first and tell them your gonna get their site disappear. threaten em. don't just go do it that won't get you any money
 
I was also in a similar situation last month and was disappointed with the whole situation. But this month I contacted his competitors and explained them that what I did for his website and what can I do for them. Fingers crossed for my new business ;)
 
tell him, you gave the rankings and you can not only take them away but you can destroy his site in the serp results
 
I hate to beat a dead horse here but ALWAYS get payment upfront for this kind of work. We are in the same business and I get an analysis / research fee upfront via Paypal and set up a 15 day trial followed by a monthly subscription based on the level of work I am doing on a monthly basis. So when they pay us our initial fee, it is automatically set up as a subscription and unless cancelled, 15 days later the monthly starts. It then hits on the same day every month until cancelled.

If I am outsourcing any part of it, I make sure my outbound Paypal payments are always a day or two AFTER I am scheduled to receive payment so I can cancel if my services have been cancelled.

You're in a tough spot, but I don't recommend any type of online retribution because word travels fast and if people find out you did something to hurt a customer online, they won't use you, regardless if you weren't paid. It's always viewed as having two sides to every story.
 
simple...learn from your mistakes, do things differently next time, and most importantly move on.

contact his competitors, offer your services.

if you land one, rank them instead.

if not, find another client and keep making money.

write some blogs with some ads targeting his keywords and rank them.

don't go on a personal vendetta to destroy him, he'll come back at you with a lawyer and criminal charges.

good luck.
 
Call the client and explain in a calm, polite but firm voice that......

"I put you up there, and I can also take you down, in the long run it's gonna cost you ALOT less money to just pay me the originally agreed upon fee"
 
Whatever you do, don't "spam them" or do anything hurtful in retaliation. Just try to talk to them and if they still refuse to pay, file a case or at least threaten them with filing one. Make sure you have valid proof of you being hired and actually performing your work. Also, in the future, try asking for some amount upfront and maybe even a contract if possible.
 
A lesson learned. Gotta get a deposit first before messing with scum.
 
tell him you'll send some links from p0rn sites to get his site lowered in the rankings. use SB to find blogs in that niche.
 
I wouldn't send a threatening e-mail saying "ill get your site deindex" You should say, since I've been working on your site for these specific keywords I will now get them permanetly deindexed from Google. Be like I cant control what will happen to the rest of your site, but I can assure you that the keywords I was working on from your site will dissapear from Google search results completely....
 
simple. robots.txt

User-Agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

When he pays you remove the file:D
 
chalk this one up as a lesson learned, get a good legal contract written up and like Abstroose said 301 the next client so you have full control if non-payment.
 
What reason did they give for not paying?

The revenge stuff may be tempting, but how does that make you money? Why waste productive time? Perhaps approach a competitor. Show him what you did for his competition, and tell him you will get him the exact same links plus more.

Prepaid legal is a good idea, but I'm pretty sure that they won't handle your case if the date of the cause of action is before your enrollment date.
 
I wouldn't resort to threats or revenge. That will only cost you more in the long run. File a complaint with BB and depending on how much he owes and what kind of proof you have that you did the work requested, you might consider small claims court. Sometimes just by filing a claim in SCC you can get them to settle without actually having to go to court. That will depend on who you are dealing with. Aside from that, chalk it up as an expensive lesson learned. ALWAYS require deposit and payment up front. If they are not willing to do that, you don't want them as a client. If its hard to get them to come off the $$$ from the begining, it will only get harder as you go along, regardless of the quality of your work. Good luck with it though, I know it sucks to get burned.
 
I would just suck it up, take the work you did, put it on your portfolio and deal with it.

If that's not good enough and you want to give him a kick in the nuts....

well....

take all the onsite content you wrote for him, spin it BADLY, blast it out with AMR, then live link the lets say.... 100= links you will get (auto approved) on each article and then SB with really bad comments using htoes as links.

Also take the live links and ping the bejesus out of them, now, take all the links and comment link you can and bookmark them all and never post a link to the money site, what we want to do is have the badly written content out ranking his onsite conent.

Then go nuts on SB linking back to his money site using the headings from the article that you have spun, and grab the links and ping them and BM them as well, that way you will devalue all the existing links he has and boom... you win.

or... like I said, chalk it up to he is a prick and you can take the high road.... your choice.
 
I'll tell you what not to do:
Follow the advice of many people here telling you to subtly extort them.

Depending on what state you live in, 1 party consent is all you need to record the phone conversation (which means, you don't need to consent). Extortion is a big no no, if you don't know how to cover your tracks. Very thin line about this regarding a not violent but libel / defamation of the companies online presence.
This is why there are things called contracts. I believe a legal written agreement is required for property over $500. But a verbal agreement is legally binding below that. So you can sue, but if the owner says he knows nothing, then you are SOL unless you can prove something. If you really want to get that money, take him to small claims. Hope you have emails, anything written, etc... If youre not willing to do that, soak this up as a loss and a lesson learned.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lesson learned.



Best to just
 
JesusBack said:
simple. robots.txt

User-Agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

When he pays you remove the file:D
Click to expand...

Epic! :eek:


Since we are on the subject is there a good resource that we can go to online for pre written or custom legal contracts to use for our seo business?
 
simple. robots.txt

User-Agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

When he pays you remove the file:D
Click to expand...

LOLZ Awsome


Moreover Best thing is

Always setup payments in milestones and packeges

like Clients must pay

onpage = $$
Offpage = $$ on spcefic page
then so on ....
 
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