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

scam

[D'Sphitz]

The SEO industry in general is such a scam, it's amazing how many people fall for it.

Re:scam

[mcgrew]

Wow, that comment was modded "flamebait"? I din't see how. Looks like SEO employees have mod points today!

If your SEO company isn't a fraud, how about explaining yourselves to us? Using mod points to censor is itself fraud.

Re:scam

[tomhudson]

I'll join you. Let the SEO scumbuckets waste their mod points - they're ALL scum.

They lie. They mislead. They con. If Vlad the Impaler were around and there was any justice in the world, they'd be "Shit on a Stick".

You don't "build your brand" by being at the top of a search engine, but by giving customers what they want, in a convenient, cost-effective and timely manner. BTW, SEO "experts" are failures at building their own "brand", because we sure as shit don't think anything of them - or their pitiful phone pitches after trolling the whois database for contact info - "What - you don't want your customers to have more traffic?" Or their equally lame spam.

Die, SEO, die!

Re:You would think

[mcgrew]

You're blaming the victims. That's like if I get robbed while walking home from Felber's and when the cops arrest the mugger, you're saying "well you shouldn't have been walking in that neighborhood". OK, next time I'll drive home no matter how drunk I am. The other drivers and pedestrians should know better than to be on any street between the bar and my house, right?

Wrong. The mugger should be prosecuted and if I'm drunk I should leave my car at the bar. If someone hires an SEO and is defrauded, the AG should prosecute. That's what he's there for.

Shocking.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is there any context in which "SEO" isn't a synonym for "worthless slimy huckster"?

Ok, somebody has to tell mom and pop about proper use of metadata; but as for the rest? "Say, this slick gentleman promises to help me lie to search engines for a very reasonable price, he seems honest to me."

Paid laziness

[ZarathustraDK]

For goodness sake, how hard can it be to optimize a website for a search-engine?

There are a plethora of howtos out there on SEO, and most, if not all, can be implemented by the people making the webpage.

Just spend a single day reading up on the stuff and save yourself a bunch. But of course that means learning something new, the HORROR!

Yeah yeah, I know, my site uses frames, which suck SEO-wise. I know... I'll correct it some day, but I wont pay 10.000 bucks to do so.

Re:Paid laziness

[Anonymous Coward]

For goodness sake, how hard can it be to read up in some medical text books for your ailment?

There are a plethora of books, and websites out there on medical issues, and most, if not all, can be understood by ordinary people.

Just spend a single day reading up on the stuff and save yourself a bunch. But of course that means learning something new, the HORROR!

Imagine for a moment that the above was said by a doctor, because some doctors were making people pay 1000s for unnecessary appendectomy operations. How are "Mom & Pop" supposed to know the difference between a bad stomach ache (or mild food poisoning etc.) and something more serious? We pay the doctors on the basis that they know this stuff.

We IT folk forget that what we do is easy because we're good at it. We have a frame of reference, and know that 10k for SEO is stupid. Most people don't have our desire to spend hours learning about nerd stuff (but luckily some of them are doctors, plumbers, mechanics etc. and when we we use their services they don't tell us to "RTFM n00b! ROFL").

Most models of capitalism (as opposed to the real world "capitalism" we have in actuality) rely on perfect knowledge of the market, otherwise capitalism is open to distortion.

Dunno, but I'm blaming the crooks

[Moraelin]

Well, if you were simply the victim, yes, i'd blame the mugger. But if it was you who hired someone to do a shady thing for you, and he shafts you, heh, I'm just going to say you got what you fucking deserved.

The fact is, there are honest ways to advertise. Just buy ad-words. There, you'll be on everyone's search page, if they search for that kind of product. Heck, Google even offers the option to show your ad when someone searches for a _related_ thing. E.g., it might show your sports shoes store, when someobody searches for slippers, if you activated that option.

It's honest, it's clearly marked as an ad, and it doesn't interfere with anyone else's search results.

But nah, that's too honest, I guess. Let's hire a "SEO" to do link spam, set up link farms, and try to _poison_ everyone's searches with your crap. It's a predatory model, in which a useful resource for everyone is devalued and turned into crap, just so some snake oil peddler can make a few extra bucks.

As business models go, it's akin to pissing in the town's water supply, so you can sell a few more bottles of soda.

And if you hired someone to do that kind of a thing for you, and he shafted you... good! Serves you right. I won't stop looking down on the crook too, mind you. But when the case is that one wannabe crook hired another crook, well, I'll look down on them both.

Re:Sounds like crass stupidity to me, then

[Moraelin]

Oh, I'm sure there _are_ plenty of stupid people out there. I just

1. have trouble imagining that the same persons who'd cheerfull blow all their money on a 419 scam, still end up having enough money left to open a store _and_ pay some tens of thousands to a SEO.

2. At least for _some_ of the things you've listed, there is _some_ explanation of what they do. If I decide to go to, say, a fortune teller, I know what service they (pretend to) provide.

There still is an answer -- no matter how stupid or dishonest -- to the basic questions:

A) what do I get for my money? and

B) how does that work?

E.g., if I go to a medium, the answers are, respectively, A) "I get to chat with my late grand-grandmother", and B) "because the medium can invoke spirits." They're stupid, but they're some kind of explanation. If I were retarded and delusional, I could believe them. The point is that the questions were asked, and the answers were (mis)judged.

Whether it's a hot stock tip, or getting my aura read, or buying a hi-fi ethernet cable, or getting some holistic bullshit therapy, _everyone_ asks those two questions and wants an answer to them. Again, even if the answers hapen to be lies or retarded, but you want to know. That's why they bother writing all those metric buttloads of pseudo-science for all those scams: because people ask the what and the how, before parting with their money.

I have trouble imagining that many people would just give some money to a stranger, without even asking those two questions. How does that go? "Sure, go ahead and do whatever you want to do, I don't want to know, just take the money and go." Does anyone actually do that kind of thing?

Re:90 complaints in four years?

[aztracker1]

In this case it's a matter of scale... what percentage of customers complaining in a given year, for Qwest and Comcast, this is probably a fraction of 1%, for concerns of less than $100 generally. For this company it is probably 10% or higher, with the dollar values in excess of $1000.

It's like the difference in petty theft vs. grand theft. Even if you commit a few thousand petty thefts, it's still petty theft.