All of Dotsquares (DS) mistakes have compounded to negatively affect our ranking, traffic and ultimately our business.
We hope by sharing our experience you will have questions to ask any company you interview.
1-Star reviews – Read them so you'll know what to expect from DS if your project goes south. Aside from ‘incompetence' and ‘not following instructions', clients point out DS attitude of always being right and did nothing wrong which is further demonstrated in their defensive reply to a complaint.
Our SEO PPC project - To increase organic traffic and client phone calls by optimizing our web site. Approx. US $9,000. Google Ads was added later for an extra boost. PPC monthly budget approx. US $1,000-$2,000.
12 months ending July 21,2021. We initially thought all was good, but eventually we were not advancing as we expected while receiving random non-related PPC calls, so we left.
Status Reports – DS had full access to our accounts for 12 months to fix previous issues, establish their approach, and monitor for optimization.
Reported: MOX DA23/100, many red Yost red dots for readability, poor quality page scores 1/10-5/10, and Semrush audit data from July 27,2021 (the closest available date to our leaving). We shared this shocking report with DS and requested a refund.
250 errors; 238 warnings; 755 notices. EX: (56 pages) h1 headings missing, (46 pages) missing meta tags, broken links, duplicate tags, toxic links, (116 pages) low text to HTML ratio, (26) pages were blocked from crawling. The blog content they created was last entered June 18,2021. Posts can't be crawled for Google indexing and DS uploads corrupted this section requiring us to hire a developer.
DS reply: "the Semrush errors and warning may occur after any website changes from your end after 21st July 2021… "Under no circumstances will a partial / full refund will be acknowledged."
We advised that no one touched the site during those six days, and suggested the obvious to compare their work to that in the report.
DS recent email to us - "there is a major drop in the website traffic after July 2021."
We were wasting money, so we dramatically reduced our PPC budget while we worked on our site.
Without our knowledge, DS left settings to include keywords totally unrelated to our business and English language which resulted in non-related PPC charges and calls throughout the 12 months. We were constantly giving DS the same list of keywords. A Google rep assisted to set it right. A few examples:
"clases de dui"; dmv citas online espatol; hacer cita en dmv; dmv en espatol; "health; "injury lawyer near", "divorce lawyer los angeles free consultation"; "medical malpractice attorney", "levine law office"; semi truck; "sierra vista lawyers"; "theida salazar";
This ‘major' drop in traffic further validates their ineffective SEO effort after 12 months, and we have longevity on our side. The drop in our performance was clearly due to relying on PPC for traffic when it should have been the SEO we discussed that would improve our organic ranking.
GMB effort - was futile. Our locations were suspended and they didn't follow through for reinstatement. More wasted money.
Fixing their mistakes – during the past three months, we have put in a lot of effort at our expense to address their mistakes. DS pulled a later audit.
Their last email remark to us just reinforces their arrogant attitude:
"IMPORTANT- We do not see any issue with the website so far. If you still need any kind of our support on fixing the development issues (If any exits), please share the list with us. We will look into the same and advice you accordingly."
"Fool me once…"
Going with DS is like going to a casino to gamble. You never know what you'll walk away with, and the house always wins.
Good work guys
We spent $50,000 with Dotsquares and Team in India and endured an 11 month nightmare. The final product - where it was on-spec and working - was great. However, the torment of getting to this point was beyond belief. We had to test 7 days a week and submitted 1800 tickets, including missing functionality, off spec, poor spec interpretation, poor navigation, accessibility ignored, bad design, poor UX, broken responsive layout, coding errors requiring weeks of rewriting, databases constructed without thinking, errors and bugs. The level of hand-holding required was extraordinary. At over 4 months overdue, with hundreds of errors remaining and massive off-spec recoding still required we moved to another company to complete the project. We took screenshots and videos of everything.
[Update: 7 months later, we're STILL rectifying the mess they left us in, with 1-2 developers full time until last month. We and our developer continue to find more issues. It's cost thousands of dollars. Almost all of this work is remedial (with just 6 man-weeks on new development, improvements, or personal preferences). Major issues like database structure problems, and users unable to pay through PayPal.]
We wrote an extensive personal review document at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vZOKaKUyhFZon2zTEx76uKBxtm-77opwIPD7nEPE-9o/edit?usp=sharing