Charles Floate

In August 2016 I contacted Charles Floate through www.charlesfloate.co.uk I wanted to speak to him about having my online store optimised, as well as having an email campaign set up for previous customers/subscribers. They contacted me within 3 days and we set up a skype meeting, we agree'd to have our category pages optimised (on page) and a short 3 month link building campaign once this work was completed.

The costs were broken down as follows: $10,000 - on page optimisation $1,500 x 3 - 3 months of link building Once this period was up we were going to re-evaluate our needs depending on results we see and go from there. They were super professional up to this point and we were looking forward to the work being started. Charles is a very well known SEO and at the time I thought he had a good standing in the community. The on page work was supposed to be completed within 6 weeks of payment being sent (all up front as per their contract).

Our first concerns were raised about the quality of work within 4 days of the work beginning. In the meeting we agree'd to give Charles Floate full server access so he can make the changes he needed to, however we also agree'd that no visual changes must be made as our conversion rate optimisation agency were actively working on this side of our business. Charles Floate too no notice of this, before long our menu had added items, our website used to have a top bar containing a link to checkout and contact details... the footer of our website had strange links added to it linking back to his own website (charlesfloate.co.uk).

I phoned him as soon as this was noticed and raised these points, I was told "these are to help google index the site". A very reasonable thing to say, however we made a serious point that we do not want the visuals of the website to be changed. I made this point once again and pointed out in our previous emails he agreed to stick to this request. At this point charles handed the phone to someone else in his office and told him to "deal with me as he was fed up of my ***".

I was rather mad at this point and demanded that all changes are undone. Our IT team rolled back the changes (as charles said he didn't take a back up because the website was 400GB?!?!? (the template he changed was 58mb)) We set up a development website on a sub domain when this was done and asked Charles team to make any alterations to the site structure on there. I was surprised they didn't ask for this.

Work continued and I put the insulting remark behind me. 3 weeks in we had a scheduled meeting and had a skype call. They told us that they were struggling as they had never worked with a magento store before, this made me worry... These guys are supposed to be ecommerce specialised and had never worked on the biggest ecommerce platform.

They advised us that if we wish to continue working with them we would have to migrate our website to woocommerce. Instantly we shut this down. Charles was aware from the start that our website ran magento from our first communication and since then many times, this was not raised as an issue ever until this meeting. Charles then said if we want to stick with Magento he would need to hire a web developer who knew magento, the price of this would be $6,000 on top of what we had already paid.

I found this to be very unreasonable so we declined, we had a contract in place and we wanted to stick to it. Charles then stated "We can't work on your website mate, it runs a *** platform which is never going to be SEO friendly" I found this answer to be insane and told him if he wishes to cancel the contract we would take a full refund (as basically no work had been completed bar meta description tags for our category pages). Charles said he would refund 90% of the fee paid ($14,500), I decided this would be fine. Accepted and just wanted to move on, put it behind us as a lesson learned from both sides.

Unfortunately after 12 missed deadlines, 148 emails and 23 phone calls we are yet to receive any money back from Charles. It has now been 9 months.

On a further background check on Charles, I found multiple people who had faced similar problems to me in the past: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/***-list/587100-hashtagseo-co-uk-aka-mbseo-aka-dhselleruk-aka-charles-scammer.html I want to warn anyone who has been taken in with the fake reviews on his blog and around the internet, avoid him! Thanks, Micky Furlong