Scum alert!
Sometimes I'm surprised at how few calls I get offering to help with our website or internet marketing. There is big money to be made if you have the right services and the right target clients. Especially when those clients are naive. Thank god that's not me!
So, today I got a call from a rep at 'traffic-power.com'. He is actually articulate and intelligent. He walks me thru some search-results reports for a client, then shows me their #1 and #2 listings. I don't follow along at that point because I actually click on the Google SERP. Bingo! A redirect page pops up.
I finally confront him with this and tell him it is unethical and violates Google's rules. Most people who play dirty pool would run off to the next sucker. This guy tries to defend the practice. And he tries to change switch subjects. "What would your boss think if his desk was suddenly filled with orders?" Geez. This goes on for a while. I thought he was finally going to bail, but then he pulls one I haven't heard in a long time..."let me get my boss on the line".
While waiting for the boss, I look at the source code of the client page the redirect leads to, iteamwork.com and find links to other sites like millionwholesalers-bizland.com that are link-farms. I tell the boss that my ethics won't allow me to do business with them, and after a brief conversation its over.
The threw all kinds of malarky at me:
- "They aren't redirect pages, they're mouse-over pages"
- "We are going to start our own search engine (and be #4)"
- "We work with hotels.com etc. and they don't have a problem with our ethics"
- "We limit our clients to three from one industry, otherwise we couldn't promise top ten rankings, that's our ethics"
- "We normally charge about $5,000 to get top rankings for 20 keywords"
- We are Google's top competition, that's why they don't like what we do
- And I could go on...they certainly did
Here how they do it, in a nutshell (from their site):
A search engine entrance (SEE) page is a one page version of content taken from your site that is housed at a new Web site address. To create a SEE page site we register a new domain based on your keywords and upload the SEE page, the Traffic-Power.com code, and over 100 unique Advertising Pages. If someone finds the SEE page directly or through an Advertising Page they will be automatically sent to your original site once they click on any link on the SEE page.
2 Comments:
At June 16, 2004 4:33 PM, Anonymous said…
Joel here,
I have talked to these guys twice,
The first time was almost a year ago. They told me they would get top 10 rankings for 20 keywords. What they really meant was 20 top ten keywords total. So at the time Google supplied results to, Yahoo, Netscape, Aol, others. So really all they needed to do was get 4 words ranked in google and there you go, do the math 4 words x 5 search engines = 20 rankings. Not a good deal once the math was done. and with a 7000 price tag.
My second conversation was 4 months ago. and laster on and off for 2 weeks.
They tried to tell me what they would do and how they would assure me of rankings. I asked about the odd re-direct, they said that it was ok with the search engines, I asked about the odd number of links going our on each one of the redirect pages, They said that the client knew about it and that it was ok and that I should not be worried. One of the redirect pages I looked at had over 150 links (LINK FARM) The worst part of that was this, They would be installing this link farm on my domain, not cool.
Then came the secret nature of the company. When you did a search for Traffic-power.com They are not ranked in Google, odd I thought, why would a company that can get rankings for me, not have their own site in the search engines? Now I see that they have a NOINDEX NOFOLLOW for the robots.txt file. That was no there before.
Here is what happened, They called explained how they did it, the pricing and all that, I said I would think about it. The same guy called a few days later, he and I started talking about how they worked and I asked about the redirect pages, He explained them away. Then I noticed that on some of the client pages, there was a tracking type script in the HTML, I found out where the tracking script was reporting to and tried to find out the company. I went the the tracking script page and all that was was place holder information about address and phone 33333, somewhere drive. las vagas nevada.
Fake info everywhere, I tried a whois lookup on the domain, again all fake info. There was one clue, this tracking site was hosted on the same server as traffic power. When the Rep called again the next day I asked him about this tracking script and he said he was not aware of that. He then said let me have you talk to my boss, he knows more than I do. His boss started talking I asked him about the tracking and he said that he did not know what it was. after about 15 minutes of more sales talk I said "Im not sure, it seems that there are some odd things going on" he then tells me what the tracking script is and how it gathers info for search paterns. I called him out asking him why , before, he told me that he knew nothing about it. He got very mad and hung up on me.
Then It got even better. The lower level rep called back asked me what happened. He then tried to get buddy buddy with me and started being more honest. He must have let his guard down because through out the conversation he was swearing and using vulgarity. I was not happy about the use of these words when trying to sell me on his product. I ended the conversation. An hour later, a new boss called and asked me what was going on and why I was upset. I told him how my questions were not answered, how I was lied to, how his reps swore at me, how I was hung up on, and how they seemed to be scamming me.
Lets just put it this way. Traffic Power will create spammy, redirect pages on your domain for you, they will install scripts and hidden links on your html pages. They will creat new spam domains that redirect users to your main site. They will assure you of great rankings, and will do anything to get them. They do what they do to make the money and then run. What happens when the search engines fiugre out the sceme they use and all the site drop from the search engines. They have the money so you cant to anything. These people wasted my time and lied to me. I have more to this story if you want to hear. Joel
At June 17, 2004 11:21 AM, dean said…
I got the same call ... guy must be working his way through the Montgomery County phone book? Or perhaps is harvesting phone numbers via a whois search of MD based websites ...
... either way, the guy couldn't pronounce healyourchurchwebsite ... nor could he give me metrics on how why I should improve my google ranking (go ahead, enter "church websites" and see what happens.
... I told him to put me on his do not call list.
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