Washington State Sues SEO Company Visible.net
pPosted by a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/52556″Sarah Bird, Esquire/a/pMay It Please the Mozzers,br /
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The Washington State Attorney General announced in a a href=”http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?amp;id=21378″press release/a yesterday that it was suing a Redmond-based SEO company, Visible.net. According to the Complaint, Visible also does business under the name WebMarketingSource.com, Caputures.com, and Captures.com (that’s not a typo). The AG also names the owner of the companies, Gilbert Walker, as a defendant in the case. br /
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The defendants sell website design, SEO, and other internet marketing services, along with providing e-conmmerce services to process online purchases for merchant customers. They promote their services through their website and by telemarketing. Packages include an intial startup fee of 3,749.99 up to $9,749.99 plus a monthly fee of $39.9 to $99.99. br /
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ldquo;When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull rank,rdquo; Attorney General Rob McKenna said. ldquo;Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didnrsquo;t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.rdquo; The Ag’s Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, said that AG’s office and the Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005. br /
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Washington filed the lawsuit on behalf of consumers and accuses the companies and their owner of violating state consumer protection and telemarketing laws. The a href=”http://www.atg.wa.gov/uploadedFiles/Home/News/Press_Releases/2008/Visible%20complaint.pdf”complaint/a makes the following claims: br /
ul
liDefendants misrepresented their ability to increase their customers’ traffic, ranking, and sales. Defendants misrepresented that their customers will obtain increased sales by using defendants’ services, for example stating that they will have quot;more business than they can handle,quot; that they will be making money within quot;60 to 90 days,quot; and that they will have a quot;hard time keeping up with Internet orders.quot; br /
/li
liDefendants also misrepresented that they are affiliated with other marketers in order to sell services to prospective clients. For example, they falsely represented that they are affiliated with Specialty Merchandise Company, a drop-ship. SMC is a quot;membership programquot; whereby member/resellers pay a monthly fee for the right to advertise and sell products that SMC directly ships to their members’ customers. The defendants directly solicited these members, claiming that they were affiliated with the company. A number of consumers agreed to p[urchase defendants’ services in the mistaken belief that they are, in fact, affiliated with SMC./li
liThe defendants are also accused of wrongfully claiming that its customer services representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls./li
liDefendants allegedly failed to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests. They continued to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitted alleged debts to collection agencies./li
liThe defendants also failed to register with the Washington Department of Licensing as commercial telephone solicitors and failed to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act. br /
/li
/ul
The AG is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices.br /
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Visible.net has not yet issued at statement about the lawsuit, but a representative said that they will probably post something on their blog. UPDATE: Visible.net posted a response on a href=”http://www.visible.net/visiblog/visiblenet-is-serious-about-customer-service-support/”rel=”nofollow”its blog/a. They deny the AG’s allegations.br /
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I’ll keep you updated as the case develops. br /
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Best Regards,br /
Sarah L. Birdbr /
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Hat tip to a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/56266″Ryan Todd/a for bringing the case to my attention. br /
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Other coverage:br /
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a href=”http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35218″Networkworld.com/abr /pDo you like this post? a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5532/1/0″Yes/a a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5532/0/0″No/a /pdiv class=”feedflare”
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Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II
pPosted by a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/21348″great scott!/a/pFollowing up on a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-whats-pagerank-got-to-do-with-it”last week’s Whiteboard Friday/a, this week Rand discusses what PageRank means to YOU.nbsp; How can you use it to your benefit? What can the metric tell you about your site, your pages, and your links to help you target keywords and improve your rankings? PageRank doesn’t show the complete picture, and it’s an imprecise metric (there are more precise metrics, such as a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape/help/metrics%23mozrank”mozRank/a…shameless plug) but it is a metric nonetheless. While it shouldn’t be overvalued–as discussed last week–it is definitely worth considering in your SEO efforts.br /
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a href=”http://vimeo.com/2228668″SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - PageRank Part II/a from a href=”http://vimeo.com/user409469″Scott Willoughby/a on a href=”http://vimeo.com”Vimeo/a.br /
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ustrongNEW PRO Video Tip!/strong/u For our PRO Members, there’s a new a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/videos”PRO Video Tip/a available in the videos section. This tip deals with how to optimize for a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/videos/view/17″cyclical content./a Whether you’re looking at seasonal media programing, new product iterations, annual content features, or anything else that comes out with new versions on a regular/semi-regular basis, this optimization strategy is an absolute must!br /
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Want access to this PRO Video Tip as well as many more video tips, guides, Qamp;A, and awesome SEO Tools? Join a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/gopro”SEOmoz PRO/a today!br /pDo you like this post? a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5528/1/0″Yes/a a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5528/0/0″No/a /pdiv class=”feedflare”
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Fluctuating Search Results, Hand Editing and Poker
pPosted by a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/21379″willcritchlow/a/pRand has talked before about the need to think like a search engineer when you are doing what we do. So a week or two ago, I came up with a theory about how I would look at things if I were a search engineer and set out to prove it.br /
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I was wrong.br /
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My theory went something like this:br /
blockquote If I were a search engineer, I would want an algorithm to determine my results. I would, however, validate these results with human input for at least the highest-volume search queries. For the very highest volume queries in the world, I would hope, by now, to have got it quot;rightquot; - and that at least the first page of results output from my algorithm would be exactly what I wanted it to be.br /
/blockquote With a corollary that:br /
blockquote If this isn’t the case, I would strongly consider hand-editing the top results for these huge volume phrases while I worked on the algorithm in order that my search engine worked as well as possible in the meantime.br /
/blockquote There is a big question over what the quot;rightquot; answer should be for very high volume generic queries that I might come back to another time (for generic queries there can often be far more than 10 pages good enough to be on the first page, and choosing between them requires more knowledge about the searcher than you can possibly have). To be clear here - I’m not talking about which results should be top under the current algorithm, but rather which pages should be top when thinking from scratch like a search engineer.br /
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To test my theory, I decided to look at the search results for poker-related terms. I think poker’s been on my mind since my a href=”http://www.distilled.co.uk/company/people/tom-critchlow.html”brother/a (who a href=”http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/distilled/distilled-in-the-courvoisier-future-500-again/”won an award/a this week - congratulations, bro) took me to a casino for my birthday so I could lose money…br /
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I picked three phrases of varying search query volume:br /
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ul
lipoker/li
li free online poker/li
lirakeback (a term related to poker affiliates)/li
/ul
And then analysed the top set of results over a week-long period.br /
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My null hypothesis was that the highest volume phrase (’poker’) would be very static through the week. Either the results are actually hand-edited behind the scenes (in which case there is very little chance that they would be edited daily) or the engineers are happy with their algorithm (and, again, trying to think like a search engineer, for a generic search like this, what factors would cause you to change your mind from day to day about the top set of results?).br /
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I have couched a lot of this in scientific language, but I’m not trying to claim my little test was perfect. There are a lot of factors that can spoil it, but taking care to minimise as many of these as I could, below are some charts that show what I found.br /
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These are charts of rankings over time the x-axis is time (from the 28th October to 6th November this year) and the y-axis is ranking at google.com (gl=US). Each of the lines (or points in some cases) is a different page (generally different website - there were no examples of different pages off the same site swapping for each other in the results sampled).br /
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I haven’t labelled the points and lines because this isn’t about whether I see the same results as you or whether they are still ranking (or even about tactics or underhanded techniques). I think the patterns are what is interesting:br /
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div align=”center”img height=”330″ width=”500″ align=”middle” src=”http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/poker.JPG” alt=”poker ranking graph” /br /
/div
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Anyway, you can see how wrong I was.br /
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The ‘poker’ search which I thought would have acted as though hand-edited over a short timescale like this (even if it isn’t actually). In fact, it behaved differently to my prediction in two ways:br /
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ol
li The results changed almost entirely on each of the first three days. I still find this hard to believe. As a search engineer, what (in the absence of news, which wasn’t in evidence during the course of this week) could cause you to want to change practically the whole set of results for such a high volume search phrase from day to day?/li
liEven with the same set of results in the latter part of the week, there were some pretty significant movements/li
/ol
div align=”center”img height=”330″ width=”500″ align=”middle” src=”http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/free-online-poker.JPG” alt=”free online poker ranking graph” /br /
/div
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The ‘free online poker’ search behaved far more like I was expecting for a high volume search phrase. It shows evidence of being algorithmic (the pinpoint result that dropped in on the fourth day subsequently went into free fall and now ranks somewhere in the 60s). I think this shows that it got there via some kind of manipulation (I haven’t looked into what, and for the purposes of this analysis, I don’t think it matters - I don’t think that it came in via a hand edit). Apart from that, the rankings are fairly stable with gradual changes and few surprises.br /
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div align=”center”img height=”330″ width=”500″ align=”middle” src=”http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/rakeback.JPG” alt=”rakeback ranking graph” /br /
/div
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I like the pattern of the ‘rakeback’ search results. The serenity of the top three with chaos below. Obviously I wouldn’t like it much if I was number 4, but that’s a different story. Given the range of insights above, I’m not sure that this graph actually tells us all that much, but since I gathered the data, I thought I’d include it for completeness.br /
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So what can we learn from this and feed back into my initial assumptions to correct them and see where we end up? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts in the comments, but the things I have come up with are:br /
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ul
li Methodology: I am the first to admit that this is not a scientific study (to understand what is really going on, I would need to see referral data for all the top results - not something I have access to for high volume searches)/li
li Testing: even if I am correct and results are as they would be if hand-edited for top volume search queries, given the data-driven nature of Google, they would want to test variants to see if they satisfied their users more/li
li Spam: perhaps the algorithm is ‘nearly right’ but still susceptible to attacks such as the one we see in the single data point in the ‘free online poker’ results/li
li News: obviously when a query deserves freshness (QDF) the results are going to be shaken up regularly. I don’t think that is the case in any of these examples as none of the results coming or going were particularly timely./li
/ul
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.h2Technorati Tags/h2a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/google” rel=”tag”google/a, a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/poker” rel=”tag”poker/a, a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/rakeback” rel=”tag”rakeback/abr /pDo you like this post? a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5529/1/0″Yes/a a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/thumbs/add/blog/5529/0/0″No/a /pdiv class=”feedflare”
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