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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."
Than they would have searched to see if the company was reliable.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
$10,000 to optimize your search engine? Guess that's one way to stimulate the economy.
The SEO industry in general is such a scam, it's amazing how many people fall for it.
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.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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."
Here's a great example I learned at a web marketing conference (so I can't take credit for this pearl):
A major UK bank was flummoxed as to why less credible credit firms were ranking higher on Google for loans, even though their own popular "lending" website had been live for over a decade. The bank hired an SEO who interviewed them about the marketplace and its customers, researched the competition, and investigated rankings based on relevant keywords found in the web server referrer logs. This armed the SEO, an outsider to the banking industry, with a unique perspective from which he taught the bank to see through the eyes of their customers. In response to the SEO's advice the bank changed all their literature about "lending" to use the word "borrowing" instead. Poof - #1 spot on SERPs in a couple of weeks. It turns out that when people need money they're interested in "borrowing", not "lending".
SEO is all about empathy. You have to understand the business you're in and the problems you're solving for your customers. When people search the web they're looking for answers to their real problems, and the companies at the top of the SERPs are the ones who have the answer to that very problem.
Doesn't a company with that motivation deserve to be found? Do you feel that, in my example, the bank was being misleading?
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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info