We just got the green light from Joshua Crouch of Relentless Digital to publish the audit of the $25,000 he took from Travis and Sons, a plumbing company.
The client is filing a chargeback, which is hopefully within the timeframe allowed.
Note that scammers usually threaten legal action, like Joshua Crouch did here, or in some cases, they attempt to take control of everything, as Tristan Parmley did.
But this only backfires, since this only brings them more attention. And they can’t argue the facts of a digital audit.
Other agency owners have said this guy is “arrogant AF”.
Are you ready to see another proud scammer get taken down?
NOTE: if he simply would have done the work promised (to rank on plumbing terms in Gilbert or Fountain Valley) or refunded the money, everything would be alright.
But instead, he decided to send me this, which was authored by Katya Lancero, who appears to be an Indian and tribal relations lawyer…?
Anyways:
Travis and Sons Website Audit
The site’s Domain Rating (DR) is at 11—a clear sign it’s lacking strong links and shows no traffic or keyword presence. Essentially, there’s been no real SEO effort here.
This is the most powerful page on their website.
The term ‘Fountain Hills’ appears 16 times. Picture someone repeating ‘Fountain Hills’ over and over in a conversation—it would sound robotic, wouldn’t it? While such tactics might have worked previously, nowadays, Google not only flags this as spam but may even penalize the website.
Buying backlinks is a big no-no. It’s not just ineffective it’s downright shady, and Google sees right through it.
Look at this the top link is ‘Chicken Rate in Hyderabad,’ linked from the anchor text ‘plumber in Mesa’ on the website. Put yourself in Google’s shoes. Does that link look legitimate? Absolutely not. It screams ‘spam’ because it’s totally irrelevant.
Google won’t be fooled by these tactics. It’s all about relevance and using such methods can actually harm your rankings.
If you ask Josh Crouch, he’ll deny everything. He’ll deny buying links, outsourcing tasks and all sorts of other things.
Someone bought low-quality links. Given the specific anchor text, such as “plumber in Mesa,” it’s clear these links were intended to manipulate search rankings.
To Josh’s credit these strategies were effective for years until Google cracked down on these tactics.
Some of these links lead to directory listings, where you pay about $10 a month or shell out a few hundred dollars to be listed in a local roofing network.
However, these listings don’t carry much weight because none of them have page traffic.
Google values relevance. Make sure your listings accurately describe your services like plumbing in Gilbert or Fountain Hills. Include links to local blogs and real photos of your work to strengthen your connection.
The main problem with these listings is their irrelevance—they’re just spam tactics. Agencies like Joshua Crouch spam home service businesses such as Howard’s into low-authority listings that lack relevancy. If you were to do it, hire someone from Fiverr or similar platforms for under $100 to do it correctly.
They listed Howard for this fine catering listing. So, Josh created a fake listing here.
Buffalo Wild Wings, Ben Jerry’s, Cooper’s BBQ. This listing on ‘Find Local Catering’ isn’t showing up in searches, and the site itself has a low Domain Rating (DR3).
It seems someone, maybe from some random country or elsewhere, was paid to get backlinks for the business.
However, Google easily identifies these links as low-quality, and as a result, they don’t actually contribute positively to improving the website’s visibility in search results. It’s not doing anything good for the overall online performance. And therefore it doesn’t show up. And that’s why the phone is not ringing.
And people like Josh Crouch, he’s not trying to do evil. He’s trying to make money. Just like Roger said, bad plumbers became bad plumbers because they were taught by bad plumbers, so they don’t know any better.
Josh Crouch may suspect, there’s this one Client, Matt, who’s unhappy. But there’s all the, I was taught by so and so how to make money using the internet, so he doesn’t feel like he’s a scammer.
Imagine you have a heart condition, and someone comes to you claiming they attended a weekend training on heart surgery. However, their attempts consistently result in deaths. That’s what happened here.
See here– zero keyword difficulty, and the traffic is pretty low. The traffic is nearly zero, and this page’s position has dropped from 13–16. We are not showing high enough to get any traffic and the reason why – look at this page Tempe plumber.
But let’s look at it from a very simple standpoint. If you are Google and you’re looking at this location page for Tempe, how much proof can you see if there is a real plumber in Tempe and who’s actually doing work there, versus something that anybody could just auto-generate?
Is there anything here that shows you that this page abides by Google’s standards of E-E-A-T, of showing real experience in Tempe, other than unclogging drains and fixing broken toilets?
Now I will ask ChatGPT to analyze this page by copy-pasting everything from the page
“My buddy, Matt, is a plumber in the Phoenix area, serving many neighborhoods. His company is Travis and Sons, which has been around a long time and a company he bought. Here is his location service page for Tempe. Please critique it for PAA and EEAT.”
Now by giving ChatGPT context, it can easily analyze what’s wrong with this page.
ChatGPT will examine the page to pinpoint any necessary fixes or improvements.
The solution to this problem is quite simple. Compile a folder showcasing your plumbing services in Fountain Hills, including videos of you visiting local landmarks such as McDonald’s and other favorite spots in the area.
This content will emphasize your affiliation with Fountain Hills, which in turn builds trust. After gathering these videos, proceed to step 2 of the Content Factory process, which involves transforming them into articles, blog posts, and videos. Finally, distribute this content across your social media channels and website.
But some people like Grant Lira offer PR that’s questionable, claiming to be experts without genuine experience or expertise, which leads to what we call ‘Fake PR’ because it takes real experience to build authentic PR.