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Andy Davis owns Pilot Plumbing and Drain, serving Vancouver and Portland. He had paid an agency for SEO for months — but this plumbing SEO audit found the “SEO” was a pile of spammy private-blog-network links from junk sites that rank for nothing. His real growth was coming from reviews, not the agency.
DR 46 → 0
spam sites linking to Pilot that rank for zero keywords
30
clients juggled per overseas account manager
1
campaign carrying nearly all paid traffic
This is a Quick Audit — we pulled Pilot apart from the public web, no logins, and looked at where the marketing money was actually going. The pattern here shows up at local service businesses everywhere: real reviews and real demand sitting on top of “SEO” that is quietly worthless.
See what the agency actually bought
Pilot’s paid search leans on a single campaign targeting “plumber near me,” and visibility collapses a few miles from the office — a sign the SEO underneath is not working. When we pulled the backlinks, the “SEO” turned out to be links from unrelated blogs about electrocardiograms, casinos, TikTok growth, and Italian pasta. Several came from fake profiles and stock images, which violates Google’s EEAT guidelines.
| Link source | Domain Rating | Keywords ranked | Topic relevance |
|---|---|---|---|
| PBN blog (EKG, casinos) | 31 | 0 | None |
| PBN blog (TikTok, pasta) | 46 | 0 | None |
| General directory (Yellow Pages) | — | — | Generic |
RUN THIS YOURSELF
Pull the client’s backlink profile in Ahrefs, sort linking domains by Domain Rating, then check how many keywords each one ranks for. A high DR with zero ranked keywords is a flagged spam site, not authority — and it tells you exactly what the last agency sold them.
Trace the links back to one spam network
The same junk content repeats across every linking site — auto-generated posts, mixed languages (Thai content on a supposedly Polish site), and identical filler reused for every one of the agency’s clients. That is a Private Blog Network, and the claim that “Google can’t catch it” is wrong. Google has already flagged these domains, which is why they rank for nothing.
Lean on what is actually working
Strip away the noise and one thing is driving Pilot’s business: their reviews. That is the real asset. The spam links are not helping, and at worst they put the site’s credibility at risk — so the move is to stop paying for them and build relevant, local links tied to plumbing in Vancouver and Portland instead.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
Ask any agency for the exact list of links they have built this quarter. If the list is blogs about casinos, EKGs, and Italian food, you are paying for a PBN that Google ignores. Knowing how to read a backlink profile is the fastest way a young agency owner earns a client’s trust.
Take the SEO in-house and fix the basics
Most of this is fixable in-house. The work is tedious, not hard — like assembling Ikea furniture — and once the foundation is built properly, maintenance is about an hour a month. Run the basics through the Metrics, Analysis, Action loop, disavow the spam, and earn a few genuinely relevant local links. That beats anything the PBN was ever going to do.
THE DELIVERABLE
Want this breakdown on your own site?
We will pull your backlinks, your tracking, and your local presence apart the same way — and tell you what to fix first.
Get Your Own Quick Audit →Power Hour with Dennis →The founder behind the business. Pilot Plumbing and Drain is led by Andy Davis. We audited Andy Davis’s personal brand — how their own name shows up in Google and AI search — as a separate entity. Read the Andy Davis personal brand audit.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.