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I cannot remember the company names or URLs, which is just as well, but early in my SEO employment days I inherited this pair of customers who caused me to lose a staff member and gain a lot of grey hair.

Our customer was an office furniture company whose website consisted of a home page and the rest of the "site" was PDF files for various product lines. Their star salesman was our main point of contact and he ran a used car business on the side. His website was a Flash horror – the kind where the site is just one Flash file. He had paid "a lot" for it so he was hosting it on his home cable ISP website allocation.

He was unhappy before I joined the company, so he was my daily dreaded phone call. Both sites were not ranking some three months after the sale and my salesman kept telling us that he was important because he could give us four more sales if we got these “right”.

To solve his Flash site problem (this was before Google could read Flash), I told him that we would re-do it as flat HTML but that we were not designers, so it would not look the same. He wasn’t happy with what we had done and kept complaining. To make matters worse, my boss agreed with him and told us to keep improving the site design. My SEO quit, largely because of this incident.

(At the time, we has a Success model where charged the customer half up front and the balance would be paid if their site ranked within six months in the top 5/10/20 results.)

Weeks later, the redesigned car site reached the Top 10 for both keyphrases, so we tried to get him to pay up.

Nothing doing – unless his boss’ site also ranked, he would not pay up. Somehow he got my boss to agree to some “final chance” deal where he said he would pay up if we did something else for his boss' site.

To cut a long story short, he never paid up. For reasons that I don't care to remember, his own site also dropped out of the Top 500 results for as long as we could be bothered to check.

The moral?

1. Never threaten an SEO or run off without paying.
2. We dropped the Success-based model because of this incident.