Be gentle, this is my first posting here! I have been building a site for a client who is doing some form of affiliation, for this he has paid a large amount of money to get a lot of help with SEO. I am doing everything he and the SEO company are telling me to do regarding optimisation, however, the one thing that does confuse me, is, if I am doing all this work, why does the seo company require the ftp, username and password to the site? what are they doing to the site that i am not already doing myself? can any one help? NB. The reason i ask is because some time ago several of my sites where hacked and false ebay pages put up. I was threatened with legal action as if I had done this myself, it scared me.I am now very wary! Thanks Lizzz
This is standard, they will want to update the html to add / remove certain things in order to help with onsite seo. I would simply ask them to provide the client with a list of revisions that have been made and also make the client aware that there is more than 1 person that has access to their site. also ask the seo company if the revisions will be final and then you can change the password to one only the client knows and yourself
You should create a particular FTP account and access, if you don't trust them but yes PRLeak is right; it saves work and time if they do the changes directly instead of explaining you or the owner what to do.
I also require ftp details when taking on a client. There are loads of factors to take into account when doing onsite SEO and relaying everything to a third party web developer just takes too long. Also (and no offence intended) web designers and developers often have a "better" way of doing things which may have some apparant benefits but totally screws with SEO.
The Reason they have asked ftp details because there are some html changes (just to make your site search engine friendly), which they might consider to do. You can create a separate ftp login for them and provide the details, this way they will not have access to your other sites on your server.