Last week I was contacted via Skype by someone from GFY who was interested in getting reviews written for major paysites. It was an order of less than a dozen reviews on major destinations, such as Brazzers, Digital Playground and Twistys. I told the client that I would have them to him by Friday and delivered them on Friday. The reviews were 500 words and he asked for additional screenshots from inside.
The client paid me on Friday when I delivered the reviews and thanked me. This afternoon, I logged onto Skype and was told by the client that Yoast was reporting negatively with regard to my text, suggesting that it had certain issues. These issues were:
• 52.2% of sentences containing more than 20 words,
• Subheading followed by more than 300 words,
• 11.7% sentences containing more passive voice than recommended,
• Readability being 59.6 on the Flesch Reading Ease test.
I explained to the client that readability within the Yoast tool set isn't always a great way to determine whether or not a review is written well, and that things such as readability levels are mainly to ensure that text can be understood by people who are still developing (i.e. people under the age of 18). I also cited two blog posts from independent services that suggested Yoast's SEO readability guidelines had issues and shouldn't be taken as the be-all and end-all of content writing. Here is
source one and here is
source two.
Additionally, I went ahead and performed a small test on sites that ranked #1-#5 for a specific paysite + review as the keyword (such as 'Brazzers review'), and found that Yoast also had issues with these texts as well. Here is a screenshot that I sent to the client to confirm these results:
So in essence, my argument is that even IF Yoast is complaining about my text in particular, it's also complaining about hundreds of other reviews that receive millions of hits via Google in traffic every week and that still rank in the top 3 positions on Google for competitive keyword pairings. Thus, the problem likely isn't with the texts themselves, but what Yoast deems to be good writing.
The client is demanding a full refund for the work, or for me to rewrite the reviews so that they comply with Yoast's guidelines. Now - I think Yoast's guidelines are too simplified for them to be useful, and that when writing reviews, I write for the person on the other end of the screen to read them, not for a robot to tell me whether or not it's good text. Constructing sentences that are compliant with Yoast's guidelines is far too labor-intensive (and not at all useful, even if the results were good), so I'm not going to rewrite them. But I also don't want to refund a client for content that is perfectly good, but that they're unhappy with because it doesn't follow guidelines that they never mentioned I had to follow in the first place.
What do you guys think? Am I an asshole here for not giving this guy his money back? Should I just refund it and take the hit? Or should I stick to my principles of Yoast being rather useless for judging text and try to explain to him why it's not a problem?
I've had very few refund requests over the years, so I don't come across this type of situation often.
Thoughts? Refund or nah?
Cheers for input.