US State Sues Web/SEO Firm For Deceiving Mom-and-Pops

netbuzz writes "The state of Washington is suing a search engine optimization and Web services outfit, based in Redmond, that has done business under the names Visible.net, Captures.com, and WebMarketingSource.com. In essence, the state says these entities have deceived mostly mom-and-pop sites through unfulfilled performance promises and financial shenanigans after charging up to $10,000 in up-front charges and more in monthly fees. About 90 complaints have been lodged over four years, the state says."

Comments

Re:You would think

[Anonymous Coward]

So called Search Engine Optimizers are a small step away from spammers.

Users relying on either spam or SEO to sell their product are the scum, and are asking for it. No matter how much you perfume the turd, it will still be a turd.

Re:scam

[Zebano]

Back when I was an applications programmer in IT, I was dedicated to creating apps for the Marketing department. This had an ancillary benefit of also making me responsible for maintaining our public web site and redesigning it to be "solution centric". I made some good tools like a product finder and comparison tool, and there are some pages out there that wasted days of my life.

After about a year of this, they decided against my and 2 other IT department employees advice to hire an SEO. We had a web tracking tool, but we now had to embedd 1x1 pixels + javascript images on every page so we could track how many users were using our site (we already had these metrics, but the SEO collated them in a prettier fashion); The best part about this was that the data was stored on their system and requires a yearly fee to use. After that we had to load up our pages with tons of misleading meta tags. Next we were encouraged to redesign our site to make it "solution-centric" (yes, we paid to be told to do this hokey redesign despite Marketing already deciding to do this; I still don't understand what's wrong with just advertising your products when your external app group has been decimated). Finally, they told us to buy paid search ads from google (about the only thing I agreed with).

In general we went from about 5th to 4rd on most search terms on the search engines we cared about (Google, MSN, Yahoo). I will third the opinion that SEOs are snake oil salesmen.

An amusing aside... After I left the group, they reviewed most of our pages and made suggestions on how to rework them (mostly the content which is in Marketing's domain) but they started trying to tell IT how the pages should be coded, going so far as to say that well-formed HTML is bad. That day, after another inane conference call; three of us left work at 3PM and spent the rest of the day drinking.