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US State Sues Web/SEO Firm For Deceiving Mom-and-Pops
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Nov 14, 2008 09:39 AM
from the about-time dept.
from the about-time dept.
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."
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You would think (Score:5, Funny)
Than they would have searched to see if the company was reliable.
Re:You would think (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously. The easy way to do this:
1. Go to Google. ...
2. Search for 'search engine optimization'.
3. Go to MSN
4. Repeat step 2
The company highest on the list of all search engines checked is probably the company you want.
Parent
Re:You would think (Score:5, Funny)
The company highest on the list of all search engines checked is probably the company you want.
Wikipedia?
Parent
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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.
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Well, this is a valid test in at least one sense. If you wish to check their competence at search engine optimization, you look at how well their own search engine results are optimized. Kinda like checking out the quality of a sign-painting place by examining their own signage.
Of course, that's based on the possibly unsupportable assumptions that (A) They did their own SEO ("ate their own dog food"), and (B) that they'll work as hard for you as they did for themselves.
Re:You would think (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Dunno, but I'm blaming the crooks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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Yes but you are bringing up a point and I doubt you even realize it,and that is the difference between a GOOD SEO and a BAD one. Because let us not forget that these businesses were Mom&Pop shops. Have you ever been to some of these little Mom&Pop shop websites? Most REALLY suck! I mean really REALLY suck! Hell on a lot of these kinds of sites simply bringing in a decent webpage designer that makes it not only easier to navigate but also easier for the robots to index would do a lot. And placing ads
Sounds like crass stupidity to me, then (Score:2)
So basically they hired someone, and paid some tens of thousands of dollars... but they don't know what that person will do, nor what they'll get for their money? :P I mean, how stupid is that?
Actually, now that I think about it, that's not the answer I'm interested in any more. I'm thinking more: is there a list of these suckers (e.g., the AG must mention them in the lawsuit), so I can offer them some equally undefined services for lots of money?
Ok, so that wasn't entirely serious, but it serves to illustr
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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
So, let me get this straight... (Score:2)
So, let me get this straight: you actuall have no idea what an accountant does, but you pay him anyway? Oh, goodie. Then I'm a lurblologist, give me some money too. Don't ask what a lurblologist does, after all you didn't want to know what the accountant does either.
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Even though the parent is joking, yours is no comparison.
Before entering into any contract you need to see if the contract is likely to be honored. This is called due diligence. I'm tired of this culture of victimization. No one is going to look out for you. You are responsible for yourself. The government is there only to provide protection of your property. The individuals aggrieved by the company have a right for their case to be heard in court. However, doing due diligence to minimize the likelihood of
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No matter how much you perfume the turd, it will still be a turd.
Ahh, so that's the politically correct equivalent of 'lipstick on a pig'.
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We're talking about mom-and-pop operations here. Small businesses should stick to what they do best, and subcontract when an odd job is needed. Do most companies shoot their own TV commercials or record their own radio spots? Of course not - they consult marketing firms who do it for a living.
Let's face it - all marketing is scummy. In traditional marketing the goal is to conv
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Sarcasm? On the Internet?
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Possibly, but there are far too many poeople here who say "let Darwin take care of the weak" and mean it sincerely.
If he was joking, he did a poor job of it, and there are a whole lot of similar "jokes" in the thread. This [slashdot.org] was an obvious joke (and even got a grin from me); modded "flamebait".
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Do you believe every salesman that comes to your door?
Of course I do. Just last week I got a great deal on some volcano insurance.
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I'm not disagreeing that people should be careful what they buy... but that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish or prosecute fraud.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Often times the road to being a victim like this is that the website owners don't have the technical competence to evaluate statements from SEO companies for truth. SEO companies also typically expend a lot of effort to maintain a positive image in search engine results.
I've had dealings with these types of companies before and the average SEO is very shady. They charge thousands of dollars promising every small business owner that they could be the next amazon.com if only they were higher in the search eng
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While you're right in all the points you make, it doesn't mean that the suckers are entirely blameless. They fall prey to their own greed, in wanting to believe that there's a "magic formula" to success, that rather than building up their business via good customer service and word of mouth, that throwing a few grand at some "web expert" will make them rich.
The business next to the office I work at told me they were going to use such a scumbag. I told him he was wasting his money. Sure enough, a couple
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I get those e-mails where they offer to put me
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They already have a web site, so they have someone they can ask, rather than just take a strangers' word for it. Or they can just search for "SEO scam" or "search engine optimization scam". When I hear of something that I'm not sure of, I search for the terms + "fraud" or "scam" or "bogus"
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i would tend to agree with you. i have a friend from high school, who although is a nice guy in person and as a friend, is involved in a lot of shady business dealings. he's always been good at making money--it runs in his family i suppose--but he does so by less than honorable means. in high school he used to build list makers (for collecting e-mail addresses) and mass mailers (to send spam) for porn site owners. and he would get paid $10k+ for each application too.
after high school, he moved on to SEO. wh
Visible.net phone message (Score:4, Funny)
Please press 1 to optimize your accounts... (Score:2, Funny)
scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:scam (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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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 pitifu
Re:scam (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's bizarre. Clients often ask about SEO stuff and we refuse to get into the black hat stuff. We tell them it's all about clean HTML, clean design and content, content, content. If they want lots of traffic they should p
Re: (Score:2)
if you're doing your job right to begin with then organic SEO follows naturally.
It's not as obvious as you make it sound. It's anything but natural, for example, to write a blog about your business, using a corporate voice. Companies didn't speak this way until a few years ago, and only those at the forefront are aware of this practise. And even if you figure that much out on your own, do you allow comments? Do you host it on your existing domain or on a new one? Do you speak as yourself or anonymously? Which strategies worked best for your industry in the past?
I agree with al
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Black hat SEO is about exploiting oversights in algorithms. Black hat is a great way to get immediate gain, but will carry severe penalties when it's found out.
White hat SEO is about providing superior information to users and building your real-world credibility over time, which is subsequently rewarded by search engines. You first provide meaningful content which is relevant to
Re:scam (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes and no (note: i work for a company that one of the products is SEO related);
The yes:
The SEO companies the "promise" higher rankings ARE a scam, and they are complete BS. 90% of SEO is guessing what google indexes, and those criteria do change pretty frequently. And because of the undefined nature of SEO, it is extremely easy to pull shit out of your ass and profess it is true, and take people's money. Any SEO guy that speaks in absolutes, is scamming you. Anything that seems like it isn't useful to the user, is bullshit.
The No:
SEO is actually real, and is necessary for pulling newer websites from lower in the rankings. Effective techniques are pretty easy, and they are listed below. All others that these stupid companies suggest are either BS or will not survive a google update in the future.
1) Page names in the URL that are relevant to what you are doing (not article11151.html)
2) Meta tags in the document that are relevant to it's content.
3) Clean HTML, use tags (such as h1) for what they were designed for
4) Internal linking (limits redundancy on pages)
5) Sitemap.xml
6) No javascript/flash content
Not much else is really necessary.
But yes, 99% of the SEO companys are praying on these small company's dumbness.
Parent
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SEOs did an amazing job for expertsexchange though
Shocking. (Score:2, Insightful)
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."
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SEO usually means "search engine optimization" rather than "search engine optimizer", but even then I see no ethical problem if I give some advice on someone with a one-man-company with a small website. For example I tell him that he should get rid of the flash animation on the home page, should use alt tags on the graphical menu links, mention the name of his company and the product or service that he sells on the home page,
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Paid laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
I doubt anyone at slashdot would use an SEO service, but you must realise that there are still a lot of net noobs out there that have no clue how to get information. For example, say you have Fred and Ethyl Mertz who have run Mertz Discount Liquor for forty years, and Ethyl's friend Lucy says "Hey, you and Fred ought to get a web site."
So Fred and Ethyl get a web site. They type "Stag" into Google (looking for their site; they're running a special on Stag Beer this week) and all they find are sites about de
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No kidding, my friend Goat Se and his store Lemon Party Liquors had a very similar problem.
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want to leave them a comment? (Score:2)
Here's their GetSatisfaction page [getsatisfaction.com].
Less Voodoo (Score:2)
While it certainly isn't Google's fault or any other search engines fault, how many people could they help by providing a link on every results page (off to the side some where) with a little explanation of how the results were achieved and maybe search links to articles about good web design and how to make your page relevant (and possibly an explanation of why SEOs are bad.)
I'm just saying, if they tried to take a little more voodoo out of the web I bet this would happen less.
Shocking (Score:2)
I once spent a few days working for a company that claimed to offer assistance with using eBay. It seemed legitimate enough at first. They sold an instructional book and a couple of CDs, and they offered a few other services like hosting ima
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Video Professor?
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