SEO firm sued by attorney General – Washington business

SEO firm sued by attorney General:

“
Visible.net and Captures.com accused of violating consumer protection and telemarketing laws
SEATTLE – The Washington Attorney General’s Office is suing a Redmond-based seller of e-commerce services whose failed promises to rev up Web traffic for small businesses drove many customers to file complaints.
“When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull rank,” Attorney General Rob McKenna said. “Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.”
The lawsuit announced today by the AGO was filed late Wednesday in King County Superior Court. It accuses Visible.net, Captures.com and their owner, Gilbert Walker, of violating state consumer protection and telemarketing laws.
The defendants also do business as WebMarketingSource.com and sell Web site design, search-optimization and other Internet marketing services, along with providing e-commerce services to process online purchases for merchant customers. They promote their services through their Web sites and by telemarketing. Packages include an initial startup fee of $3,749.99 up to $9,749.99 plus a monthly fee of $39.99 to $99.99.
Senior Counsel Paula Selis, an assistant attorney general who heads up the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, said the Attorney General’s Office and Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005.
The suit accuses the defendants of the following violations, among others:
Failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and failing to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.
Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase traffic to customer Web sites by achieving top search-engine rankings and failing to deliver other promised services.
Falsely claiming an affiliation with other marketers including Specialty Merchandise Company, a so-called drop-ship wholesaler.
Claiming that its customer service representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.
Failing to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.
Continuing to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.
The state is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices.”

World on economical crisis – a pictorical presentation

SEO Spam again needs to stop to get good name for SEO industry

We need to top these Spam SEOs and SEO companies from sending out bulk mails to get some good name for ethical SEO companies. Their claims are ridiculous.

“Hi,

The purpose of this letter is to introduce “88888888888Solution.” – an India
based company and Our link popularity service.

We have been handling SEO and link popularity campaigns since last 2.5
years for our numerous satisfied clients across the glob. We’ve strong
and experienced team of Link popularity experts, who has expertise to provide
high quality, ethical and theme based links. We do not use any shortcut
tricks, software and FFA/Spam/web rings site while creating links and most
importantly, we charge very nominal for phenomenal service, please see
below to get an idea about our methodologies for link popularity campaigns
:

Our Approach for securing links :

(a.) First of all of we analysis the campaign to get familiar with current
statistic, relevant industry and competitors, It makes us easy to approach
right link partners.
(b.) Second step includes creation of database of relevant websites which
are to be requested for Link Exchange through emails and form submissions
– if they have implemented form for link exchange.
(c.) In 3rd step : we manually draft emails as a link exchange request
to webmasters through Outlook express, we offer our web directories/site
to webmasters for link back basically, we follow 3 way link exchange process
which yields a ONE Way link for client’s campaign.
(d.) Finally, we provide link backs to those webmasters who revert us positively
to finished off with link exchange.

We ensure that we never indulge in any Spam activities as we never send
follow up to webmasters who do not respond to us in our first email and
If someone doesn’t agree with 3 way exchange we simply delete his/her id
from database.

Please get back to me for any information/queries.

Eagerly looking for your earliest reply.

Thanks & Regards,
—
Sales Team

:

Will effect of US subprime crisis the end of sky scrapers?

Image depicting fall of Lehman brothers US 4th largest bank,

SEO widget – SEO statistics widget launched.

We recently developed a cute tool which will display your,

Alexa rank, Google data yahoo data, Pagerank and other search engine data on your website. Please check out your New widget here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php

This widget is a must have for your website it shows who is online on your website. This is an additional feature apart from the other features.

Spammer Gets Jail – AOL user spammer gets jail

A spammer who spammed AOL users badly with his junk pharmacy spam got 26 months of Jail term. I am sure the Jail term he got is something he deserved. I wish all email spammers in this world gets Live jail terms. They are terrible low lifes.

Google’s Amit Singhal talks about technologies behind Google

Amit Singhal – Google Fellow and senior Google scientist has come up with a beautiful explanation on how well the technologies work behind the ranking algorithm of Google,

I agree with Amit that Search has come a long way from being a just a search engine to understanding more of users queries on what they want. Now Search engines can understand synonyms, complicated queries, language queries and a lot more of these type of stuff that were once far away from Google.

As per Amit Google has grown to a massive index from what it had been before. Now they have an index in multiple tera bytes before it used to be some Gigs Only. Now Google’s advancement in understanding pages had come a long way before it used to just be the keywords on the page title, and the backlink anchor text now it has become much more better. As he points out in the article even without the phrase “galleria sprovieri londra” the site sprovieri.com ranks No.1 because Google has much more sophisticated system to identify the authority of
a site.

Some of the examples he has given for understanding queries is excellent. Kofee annan is for someone searching for kofi annan and Google does say whether you are looking for it, similarly when someone searches for Dr.Zhivago then he is actually searching for a Dr with the name Zhivago where as when he is searching for “rodeo dr” he is actually searching for Rodeo Dr a road . similarly he talks about other queries like “back bumper repair” ramstein Ab, b&b ab which searches for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta.

The most surprising query is the one where he talks about the new york times square’s famous church. Obviously New york times or Ny times refer to the famous magazine or website Nytimes.com. Now when a search like “new york times square church” Google has to figure out that its actually about the church in Madison square New york. Now when you check the query Google actually understands it pretty well and guides to the right site. Similarly as Amit Points out understanding the users are an other major factor. Google has to be the best in figuring out where the users actually came from that way they have the option to understand and deliver relevant results based on their local area requirements. Google does this very effectively.

Overall Google has been doing a great job and i wish Amit and everyone behind Google’s algorithm to bring more innovative things

Official Blog post here
Vijay,

Avoid Sponsoring WordPress theme – Beware of wordpress theme sponsoring

Google has been very tough recently on sponsoring wordpress themes. I know at least one company who actively seeks business to place links on sponsored wordpress themes. I recommend to stay away from those shady tactics. Sponsoring wordpress themes and getting link from the footer is same as buying links there are lot of sites affected by this activity. If Google sees unbalanced links coming to commercial sites from wordpress themes. They will devalue it so there is no point in paying for it. Also there are situations where a site resulted in plus 60 or 950 penalty after sponsoring wordpress themes.

So is it worth to sponsor theme pay for it and finally get banned? I recommend instead of using your resources on tactics like that find innovative ways to make people link to your site. This is 10 times more benefit able than sponsoring themes.

If you develop a word press them you have all the rights to get the necessary credit for it. But if you are using it for commercial gains and manipulate search engine rankings then you should be ready to face the consequences. I recommend stay away from ideas that are hurting search engines badly. Search engines do have a tolerance level but if 1000s of sponsored links are damaging the reputation of results then they will act against it.

vijay,

Search Engine Genie Solves your SEO problems

This post is a bit of a Marketing hype. We at Search Engine Genie had been helping Webmasters and Site Owners solve lot of problems with their site. Most of them come to us asking us to fix a flash or dynamic site in SEO point of view, with Search engine penalties etc. We do our best and guide them or work on their site to get it out of any potential Search Engine Problems. If you are looking for solutions to your Search related problems contact us by sending an email to our support team.

Google Leads the table in helping out webmasters

Google has picked up its efforts to help out webmasters for their website related problems. They now guide webmasters to effectively maintain a website so that it gets its deserved rankings. Google gives support in Google groups and other various forums, by employee blogs ( Matt cutt’s blog ) , Official Google blogs ( especially webmaster central blog ) , Google live webmaster chat ( 2 already over ) and now we have Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer coming up in July. We are very excited about this and thought we can create some cartoons representing Google’s good work.

1. Matt Cutts , Adam Lasnik and other Googlers are Desperate in impressing webmasters with their active participation in various forums and Blogs.

2. Matt Cutts Speaks in various conferences to make webmaster understand the way Google works.

3. Google is becoming increasingly popular among webmasters and site owners for their effort to become closer to them. Two successful Google Webmaster Live chat is a proven strategy.

4. Matt Cutts Answering Q and A in Webmaster Conference

5. Google has been actively promoting Google Webmaster Central BLog them want webmasters and site owners to read it. Also their Webmaster Tools are becoming increasingly popular.

6. Calling all webmasters to participate and visit Google Webmaster help Groups.

Vijay
Search Engine Genie.