Direct Solar Care Rips Off Contractor Hinckley UK
Please exercise caution when dealing with Direct Solar Care, their mother company Direct Solutions Group (Company Number: 10164568) or their director Steve Metcalfe. Their address is: Graphic House Druid Street, Hinckley, Leicestershire, UK LE10 1QH
I have made the mistake of trusting Steve when he has hired me to provide services for Direct Solar Care.
There were warning signs right from the beginning when I had to ask for my payment repeatedly after the first month. Eventually, I've been paid but the same story happened again after the second month. I have received my second payment over a month late so in the third month I have sent my invoice earlier. No luck this time. I continued work until the end of the fourth month, believing the repeated promises of payment from Steve Metcalfe.
In the end, I have not been paid for 2 months for a total of £800. Not a huge sum, yet they decided it was worth more than their word and repeated promises of payment. I have been told that I will get my money in the following day, the following week or next Wednesday too many times to count.
Learn from my mistake of trusting Direct Solar Care and Steve Metcalfe and use caution before you deal with them. When a person or a company thinks it's ok to rip off someone who has done work for them this shows their true character. Don't be the next victim!
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Steve
Hinckley,United Kingdom
Attila Leder will harm your SEO. Do not use his services.
#2REBUTTAL Owner of company
Thu, April 20, 2017
Atilla Leder was hired by Direct Solutions Group as a freelancer to help with Search Engine Optimisation or SEO work. In essence, help our website Directsolarcare.com to be found in Google by prospective customers in order to drive traffic or leads from Google to our website. Attila took advantage of the limited SEO knowledge we had. In the process, we discovered that he was not doing any work but yet still claiming payments. In addition, he implemented s****.>
Attila applied to complete SEO for us under the instructions that we want white hat SEO (or best practices as recommended by Google) to boost our rankings in all major search engines. We employed him as we did not have the knowledge and time to do it ourselves.
We originally looked on Upwork (https://www.upwork.com/) to find Attila, which was another website or an approach to find freelancers online that we were new to. As soon as we decided to go with him he immediately moved us away from using Upwork. In hindsight, I now believe was his way to maximise his profit as well as protecting himself so that we cannot leave him a review and let others know of our troubles with him. Clearly in breach of Upwork’s terms and conditions.
With regards to his invoices, which were all put on our system and normally takes 30 days to go through - these are our standard payment terms. In the end, we decided not to pay him the last two months of his wages as he had caused so many problems including damage to our SEO strategy costing us more to fix what he did than he was owed.
Issues includes - instead of gradually improving our website rankings in Google, one day our websites suddenly completely dropped off the face of the search engines. Attributed to the black hat links Attila was placing on our websites and other very malicious s****.>
This caused us to have a massive loss in business as no one could find us when they searched for the services we provide. When questioned about this he said it was nothing to do with him and that it happens all the time with everyone’s sites. Coming from a person employed to make sure that we increased our visibility, not disappeared completely, this was concerning and so we started to look into both the individual, Attila Leder, and the work he was supposedly doing.
The first marker of the fact that Attila Leder was not doing any work and was actually causing us harm was the fact that we had shut him out of our website content management system so that he couldn’t do any work while we were being told that he was. It wasn’t until over two weeks later that he noticed. This caused us to wonder what he had actually done in terms of SEO at all.
When he did see we had shut him out, we received a very threatening email off of him to our employee who deals with our websites. These threatening emails increased in severity and frequency over the next month or so.
When we asked an outside source to look into his work, what he found horrified us. Not only had the amount of work that had been completed was minimal, what had been done was black hat SEO - a way to get your sites listed but through ways that could eventually get us comprehensively blocked off all search engines. As you can imagine, this is the last thing any business wants and so we have now had to employ someone else to sort out our sites so that we are not blacklisted by Google, or Bing, or any other search engines.
For those looking to employ Attila Leder to do your SEO we would seriously warn against it. The below is a report from our new SEO manager stating what he did and why it is damaging to our websites.
“The problems with the work completed by Attila are manyfold. The first example that I would like to draw to your attention is http://www.solarpowerbook.org/. This is a very bad website that he is using to place links. These websites are designed to trick Google. Not only is this website atrocious in itself, the implementation techniques are old and outdated. The techniques are called spinning, or content: if you read any of the content you will note it does not make sense.
This one site is exemplar of all the other sites that he links your sites to. There are also many links to poor or even spam-like directories.
He recommended using dynamic meta tags across the entire website, instead of optimising every page individually. This shows a huge lack of strategic approach. The same keywords were optimised for many pages, with no purpose of structure
Most surprisingly, and disturbingly, Attila Leder created articles from our website and placed links to his other client sites without our consent.”
Despite us explaining this all to Attila Leder, he continues to harass our staff and publish harmful articles such as this warning people to stay away. Unfortunately, his allegations are more a reflection of himself - avoid giving him work for all the above reasons, and don’t fall victim the same way we did. It is going to take us a long time to repair the damage Attila has caused.