SEO "Company" asking me to change my nameservers

tntsniper

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 6, 2007
Messages
84
Hi all!

I'm a bit concerned. I hired a guy (Who came highly recommended in one of my reddit communities) to boost the speed of my website and do some tweaks to make it load faster and provide better ratings. He's based out of Turkey, not that it matters, but it's already red flagged my credit card for suspicious fraud solely based off of the location of Turkey.

Today, he asked me to change my nameserver to:
> DNS1: ray.ns.cloudflare.com

> DNS2: zara.ns.cloudflare.com

He showed me a screen shot where he moved my txt records/mx records, etc over and told me the transition would be seamless when I asked about my 365 emails.

I'm concerned that if I move my domain to his nameservers he will have fully control over my page, can intercept company emails and hold my data/website/etc hostage. Am I right in telling him that I would prefer to keep my nameservers where they're at?

Thanks!!
 
Did he specify _WHY_?

Yes - you are correct that it is always suspicious when someone tries to move your information and what not.

Do you have a service through cloudflare?
 
Did he specify _WHY_?

Yes - you are correct that it is always suspicious when someone tries to move your information and what not.

Do you have a service through cloudflare?

He said going through cloud flares dns is faster, which I kind of agree with. I do not have a cloudflare account, it seems as if he does and my website would be under his acxount. He offered to give me my own login to manage the dns, but I'm just really concerned about his abilities to now divert emails, etc.

I'm leaning towards not going through his account, if anything, creating my own.
 
Oh geeze.. Yes - if you believe Cloudflare will help with caching and all that make your own account. Certainly do not let some clown hold your stuff hostage.
 
Oh geeze.. Yes - if you believe Cloudflare will help with caching and all that make your own account. Certainly do not let some clown hold your stuff hostage.

Thanks for the help/advice. Much appreciated! I ended up declining his offer.
 
I would be curious what the Turk did to speed up your site outside of caching with cloud flare. Like optimize some wordpress queries, or size images correctly?
 
Cloudflare is a solid service, also easy to setup for yourself if you know a bit about DNS/Nameservers, etc.
 
Ahh yes, welcome to the wonderful word of SEO salesmen. What he was suggesting wasn't wrong, it's just he should have had you sign up for a cloudflare (free is fine for this) account, or handed you the username/pass.

Most SEO tweaks are easy, so it's ok to pay someone to optimize your site, but be cautious if they try to subscribe you to constant SEO maintenance.

In general, SEO can be improved with (this is besides improvement to the content):

Site:
- Having a mobile version of the site (responsive or otherwise, this is big with Google)
- Caching (important if your site is on WordPress)
- Image optimization (better compression, strip metadata, use srcset images)
- Proper meta tagging (Google prefers JSON-LD)
- Having a sitemap.xml
- Having your site signed up on Google Webmaster Tools.
- Code minification & flow improvement. Minimize GET requests by combining JS files and CSS files together before minifying them. Separate necessary JS / CSS for first render (above the fold) from JS / CSS that is needed later (deferred load).

Server:
- Proper Cache Expiration setup
- Minimize any redirects
- Gzip Compression turned on
- Edge caching with something like a CDN (cloudflare) can help a ton if your site is visited over large geographical areas (nationwide for example)


With these tweaks (and a few more I probably forgot), you'll be able to score on GTMetrix 90%/A on most pages. I'm a perfectionist, so most of my sites don't release below 92%.

That's only a piece of the puzzle as improving the user experience is always good. The hard part is structuring the content so that it hits with your intended audiences search results.
 
If you change your name servers over to CloudFlare, your authoritative DNS servers will then be CloudFlare which means he can control what IPs your URLs resolve to. If you didn't sign up for CloudFlare, authorize the use of CloudFlare, and, most importantly, don't have access to the CloudFlare account, do not switch your name servers over. While you would still retain ownership of the domain through your registrar and you'd be able to change them back if he was found to be doing anything nefarious, it could take up to 24 hours for the changes to fully replicate.
 
Did he specify _WHY_?

Yes - you are correct that it is always suspicious when someone tries to move your information and what not.

Do you have a service through cloudflare?
Had the CEO bring an SEO guy onboard without consulting me who did almost exactly that.
They want to change the server names because it's better for google 'seeing them'. That said I was also not happy with changes they made (marketing wise) and the level of control they wanted too so ended up getting him out of there.
Turned out when doing our further SEO research, the initial changes we'd made had already helped a lot and we already were doing well on image search results etc.
 
They want to change the server names because it's better for google 'seeing them'.

Yeah, this guy is full of shit. Cloudflare is alright, but there are other DNS companies that are just as fast and won't eventually make you move all your eggs to one basket.
 
Back
Top