According to Sean:

On the topic of metadata, Ohye said that Google is now once again pulling its search index descriptions, or snippets, from website metadata description information. Ohye noted that for several years, Google considered metatags as a spam technique, but are now again considering meta description information when determining overall search relevancy.

I’ve read and re-read that paragraph four times now, trying to determine if I’ve misinterpreted it.  I can’t see a flaw in what I thought I read the first time.  “now again considering meta description information when determining overall search relevancy” seems pretty straight forward to me.

I’ve tweeted a confirmation request to Matt Cutts, and we’ll see if he responds at all one way or another.

Update: Vanessa Fox Weighs In

In response to Alex’s tweet, Vanessa Fox, herself often misquoted, chimed in with

my guess is that was almost-right reporting. And that she actually said keywords tag not used, but description used for display.

She then went on to tell me that

There’s no quote in the story though. just a summation. this happens all the time when I speak

Well, if that’s the case, that’s a significant mis-interpretation on Sean’s part.  Which might explain why SEO types who attended that keynote haven’t lit up the blogosphere with the “news”. 

As I’ve been digging around the interwebs for more info, Christian Maund-Anderson said he got the impression it was business as usual – that they may, or may not, use it, as overheard while at the conference.  Since he said he got that impression from “overhearing” it at the conference, I’m not sure how that figures into the equation.  When I asked for clarification, and if it was a google employee who said that, Christian then said

Yeah, they gave pacman aka googlebot a sugar pill, they are definitely ramping up on information retrieval.

LOL uh, okay then!

Testing Testing, 123, Is This Thing On?

What I want to do is some testing.  It’s just that this could be tricky, both because proper testing of this could take some serious time, and I’m also intuitively thinking it’s a minor factor, so any testing done needs to be done quite carefully and across multiple scenarios. So good luck finding the time for that any time in the very near future!

Call For Opinions, Tests, Data

What I can say is this – if you’ve been down this road recently and have conducted any actual tests, I’d love to see the data.  Or hear your thoughts. And as I learn more I’ll share it here…

UPDATE June 12th – Testing Begun

I have actually begun a Meta Description Usage Test for this scenario, and since Vanessa and Jill have weighed in (see comments below) I’ve redoubled my efforts.  But I don’t want to be isolated here.  So if you would like to help here’s what I’m doing.

I created a new page on my old business’s site just for this test.  I have a meta Description with text that’s unique to that page and not in the page’s content.  I’ve then linked to that page from both that site’s home page (the only page remaining on that site these days) and from my blog.  I then added it to my sitemap.xml file, and resubmitted that to Google to try and expedite it’s inclusion in the SERPs.  From there, I’ll see if that exact match wording will cause that page to show up in the SERPs.

That’s the first step in the testing process.  Up for it?  Let me know!

Also, if you know of any real world test conducted in the past few months, that info will help…

Update #2

Jill Whalen commented that new pages may not be treated the same as old ones, so I will now add an existing page into the test mix to see what happens with that and if there’s a difference between a brand new page and an existing page.

What To Do About Meta Descriptions in the Mean Time

Regardless of whether it’s true or not, for quite a while I’ve been advocating to clients that it’s my belief the best practice for Meta Description usage is to write content that engages the reader in helping them understand what the page is in a way that attracts them to visit your link as compared to competitors.  And in that process, you should integrate the top phrase of the page.

The thinking here and as I’ve seen others do and advocate, is that if someone types a phrase to search, the words in that phrase will be bolded in the SERPs.   And if those words are highlighted in the Title and the Description, it’s more likely that the person doing the search will say “this one really is on target for my search”…

And in my A/B testing over the years on several client sites, that’s been the case.  It’s critical though, that the description not be keyword stuffed, and really does make sense as a readable chunk of text…

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Meta Descriptions Now Count for SEO says Google? is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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And keep your eyes out in the near future for a “So you think you want to be a liveblogger” article.  Because my experience will save you much pain.  Much very serious pain.   Trust me on that.

Note – clicking on a link will take you to that page in a new window so you can come back here and read the rest of the articles.  Which I know you’ll do.  Because I know you respect how much sweat, pain and agony I put into these.  For you.

Opening the Contract Kimono: Translating your Pricing Model to Legal Agreement

If you are an independent consultant, a small shop owner or at an agency, you’re going to want to check out the Contract Kimono session.  There’s some great stuff in there that could potentially save you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits.  And some solid points made about why some contracts in our industry should be Pay for Performance.  Which until this session, I had been totally against.  And now think is worth consideration…

Demystifying Online Attribution

Lately I’ve been working hard (okay, I don’t work hard – except when I’m liveblogging…) to drive home the importance of proper conversion attribution to clients.  If you think “We had 30,000 visits this month and a 60% bounce rate, so something sucks”, you may be completely off the mark when going to address it.  Because you don’t track the full life cycle of some purchase decisions.  Online attribution can resolve that problem and not only save your company a lot of money, it could significantly increase your revenue…

You&A with Matt Cutts

A regular comedy show ensued this year as Danny Sullivan interviewed Matt Cutts taking questions from the audience, and injecting his own pet peeves and wise-guy style into the process.  Which both kept Matt on his toes, and everyone in the room, including Matt, laughing…

So You Want To Test SEO?

Never take Matt, or Rand, or Aaron, or Jill, or anyone in our industry at face value when you’re doing SEO.  If you’re not testing, and doing it properly, you’re not getting the most you can for your company if you’re in-house, or your clients if you’re a consultant.  This was a big one for me.  Not only did I feel by this time that I’d actually gotten into the groove of liveblogging, but it was on a subject I’m passionate about.  And even though 95% of everything shared by speakers this week was something I already knew (hey – I put in 10 hour days for the past 10 years, okay?), I came away with great new stuff more from this one session than I did from any of the others I attended.

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And when you’re done reading those, come back again.  Because then you’ll be able to go visit the Bruce Clay blog and read all of Susan and Dana Lookadoo and Gil’s session coverage as well.

And then you can go to SearchEngineLand and go read all the other liveblogging coverage for both day one and day two.  Because there was a lot of it.  All for you.

Then, when you’re done there, be sure to send Lisa Barone and Virginia Nussey flowers, cupcakes, rainbows, puppies and kittens encouraging them to complete heal so the next conference they’ll be able to liveblog again.  And I’ll be spared the cruel and unusual suffering.  Okay?

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. My SMX Advanced Liveblogging Index is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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But since I actually payed attention and liveblogged along the way, I figure I’d share what I got out of it with you.

(And maybe make up for the guilt I felt at using that excuse)

Of course, as has been the case in the past, this was a one on one interview style session between Danny Sullivan from Third Door Media, and Matt Cutts.  For those of you who are not Cuttlets, Matt’s the guy who guns for spammers over at Google.  And he’s a pretty good pool player as well.

I’m sitting in the front row, just left of center – to my left are Jonah, Marty Weintraub and Matt McGee, and to my right is Susan Esparza.  And it’s Danny and Matt up on the stage.  So I guess you can say in just 3 liveblogging sessions I’ve skyrocketed to the top!

Or you can say – who was the clown that let Alan in the door in the first place?

Here we go!

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The session starts off with Matt and Danny donning life vests – half the people in the room are confused, and the rest of us get it that they’re making a joke about the recent MayDay update over at Google.  (If you don’t know that “Mayday – Mayday” is a distress call by boaters, well then, you don’t get the joke either, now do you?)

I also need to say that this is already going south fast – Danny and Matt are ripping jokes left and right, faster than I can keep up even at 55 words a minute.  Needless to say, it’s killer stuff!

1^st Question from Danny – to talk about this Mayday update (but he interrupts the process by breaking out the caffeine and now I think they’re set!

So Matt – you’ve got this big mayday ranking update plus Caffeine is live right?

Matt – SearchEngineLand has a post just now to announce that Caffeine being live!

Here’s the story on Caffeine.  Way back in the ancient days when Alta Vista roamed the earth – Google hadn’t updated our index in 4 months.  We had to crawl the web for several days.  We didn’t have enough capacity to update all the data centers.  So we had this thing called the Google dance – for about a week we had the data roll out.  But we realized people want fresh results.

Freshness matters. In 2003 we switched to an incremental system – we would crawl a portion of the web every night.  Update Fritz was switching to incremental.

Caffeine – instead of a billion docs in one day, with Caffeine, when we crawl, we immediately index it.  This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time.

Analogy – before you might have waited for a bus to come by.  Now it’s like your document comes out the front door, and a taxi is waiting and whisks it away.

It massively increases our ability to scale up the index. We can index a lot more documents.

Its something like 50% fresher.

Its also easier for us to annotate documents with information.  Caffeine lets us any type of general information we want to.

Caffeine lets us process on the order of 100 petabytes.  (Beyond my brain’s capacity to envision because I’m just a marketing guy! )

Danny – talk about the annotation part of it, mentions meta keywords

Matt We don’t use meta keywords!

Danny – you could see all the facebook likes…

Matt If it’s publicly available, we could do that.  If somethings behind a password, we can’t.

Matt – metadata or just plain data, Google has the ability to attach more stuff.  We can think of new signals without writing new code.

Danny – can you talk about citations?  – that’s Metadata.

Matt –  Twitter recently introduced an annotation API – there’s info encompassed in a tweet – where it came from, etc.  – Google has a lot of extra associated information that we can incorporate and then throw in that document.  Content, things that are linking to it.

Danny – Caffeine – faster indexing – new ability to attach metadata and then down the road…

Matt – my team is just starting to interoperate with some of the data.

Mayday was a ranking change – entirely algorithmic – my team had nothing to do with it.  Google as a whole raised the bar.  In 2010 we look at the challenges of the web as it exists – how do you look at stuff that’s not maybe web spam but maybe not the highest quality.  Mayday is looking at how do we look at site quality, page quality?  Users don’t use content farms – its one of the things we look at.  How do you improve the quality of the results?

How much content am I generating, how fast?  Uniqueness, editorial control…

(Note – Danny tries to pin Matt down on the issues some of us find annoying – like Mahalo getting rankings even though they violate several Google guidelines that the rest of the world is held accountable for, or Wikipedia polluting the results pages.  Matt, ever the evasive one, consistently dodges the bullets flying at him).

Danny – What is that designed to kill?  Mahalo?

Matt – Google doesn’t want to get into value judgments – rather than individual sites, it’s a complete algorithmic change.

Danny – was this in response to Mahalo and you’re saying no.

Matt – I’ve been on a site where there was a content free (lacking content) article.  And that’s the kind of thing we’re looking at.

(As Matt’s talking about a sample site, Danny’s trying to figure out which site.  Lots of laughter…)

Matt – we just yesterday announced in Webmaster tools where you can see soft 404’s  – the site says 200 found but it’s not found.

We’re going to keep working on paid links, We’re looking at ways we can make the cached page link a little bit better – how can we improve that experience?

If your description isn’t displayed wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out where on the page that came from?

(Danny keeps bringing up the issue of Wikipedia dominating and Matt keeps avoiding that – go figure!)

Danny – how about HTML 5 and caffeine?

Matt – very good question – HTML 5 is different – we don’t give points for validation.  But we are looking at better ways to do parsing.

Danny – Do you still give points if your site has adsense? ( a LOT of audience laughter at that one)

Matt – Conspiracy theories galore!

Danny – I’m trying to get you to shout – yes! Yes it does!

Danny – as the results get increasingly blended, is Google planning on providing webmasters more data in webmaster tools?

Matt – I don’t think we have any plans in the works.

Danny – Do you want to tell them all they get Nexxus phones now?

Matt – we were going to say that but Graywolf wouldn’t let us. (Ha!)

Danny asks about sites that sell links –

Matt – we have taken action on individual sellers.  I think we’ve been taking strong action – and we have some new tools to make sure they don’t work.  We’re getting laser guided scalpels – its harder and getting harder to have paid links work.

Danny – I love my job (#Win)

Matt – I think Danny should do the daily searchcast again

Danny – you’ve said nofollow is no longer a factor – are you bleeding value from strong pages.  Is there no way for us to signal to you the importance of pages?

Matt – there is – which pages do you link to from your root page?  Which pages are easy to find in your site?  Rather than doing special order stuff, I would think about sites like the ODP – think of that tree structure.  Take the products and pages that are important – put links to them closer to the top of the page.

Danny – will caffeine affect the way you handle javascript?

Matt – we are more able to find not just raw links, but actually process javascript.  We’ve seen a few spammers try to prevent that – we’ve improved our ability to read javascript and see links in javascript.  If you’re white hat its always best to have HTML links to be safe.  But we are getting better at reading javascript.

(Really Matt?  Because I just had a client kill the javascript they were using to link to over 4,000 internal pages that were never indexed and 6 days later, over 3,000 were indexed!  Sorry – that’s an Alan insight Rant… Now back to our session!)

Danny – how many of you like the new look of Google – a few hands – how many hate it – a few hands – how many don’t care – a few hands!

Matt – How many use firefox?  A lot of hands – Internet explorer- a few hands – Chrome – a few more than use IE…

Danny – you’re just promoting your own stuff- Google shopping, Google this, Google that – do you see anything wrong with that?

Matt – I think Bing is using big weather widgets so the organic results are lower down

Danny – so you’re saying Bing is worse!

Matt – someone asked – is google favoring YouTube – no we bend over backwards to show videos from other sites.  There are people trying to do the right thing – it’s not my area but there are people at Google focused on that.

Danny – When are you going to use rich snippets for ecommerce because right now Yelp has an advantage.

Matt – we have a tool in Webmaster tools for rich snippets – timeframe its not weeks but maybe not months either – I think a relatively short time.

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Lightening Round

Danny – do we need to have flash sitemaps to finally deal with flash indexing or is [Steve] Jobs going to kill Flash?

Matt – we don’t need separate sitemaps – its not as helpful to have your entire site in flash.

(Well thank you very much Matt.  Now can you go back and kill the press release Google did way back when with Adobe, claiming that Flash was more indexable?)

Danny – is bounce rate part of Google’s algorithm?

Matt and Danny then proceed on to go back and forth as each time Matt answers, Danny thinks it’s an evasive answer   This goes on for several minutes and it’s getting funnier by the moment…

Matt‘s final answer: to the best of my knowledge bounce rate is not used in our general algorithm.

Danny – my pet peeve – it’s not ten results on the page.  Getting rid of the indents, sitelinks, wikipedia – you get more variety….

And that’s it!  Danny closes by asking people – if Matt’s on the way to the bathroom, please – let him come out first before you go up to him!  (Ha!)

YAY!

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. You & A with Matt Cutts – SMX Advanced is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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So if you want to, you can read my take on the session,  check his out, and compare notes

Okay – we’re about to start the morning SEO session on day two at SMX Advanced!  I wore a t-shirt this morning because yesterday I was too warm in my long sleeved shirt.  Except the air conditioning is working too well today for my change in attire.  I’m going to chalk it up to life doing what it wants in spite of my plans, and just focus on liveblogging.  Another notch as well in the “things livebloggers have to deal with” column.

This session’s on one of my favorite topics, testing SEO.  Because no matter what I’ve read, heard, or “learned” over the years, none of it matters until I’ve been able to test it out and verify that it applies to each of my clients and their unique situation…

For this session, we have:

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal

Speakers:

John Andrews, , Seattle SEO Consultant
Jordan LeBaron, Senior Consultant, Omniture, An Adobe Company
Branko Rihtman, R&D SEO Specialist, Whiteweb
Conrad Saam, Marketing, Avvo

And here we go!

Vanessa’s up at the podium, starting things off, going over the usual introductions, but in Vanessa’s fun way

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First up is Conrad.

You hear the word “statistically relevant” – what does that mean?  If we were to test ten people in this room, and the men were all 4′ taller than the women, you’d be confident that they’re all taller.  If they’re all 4″ taller, you’d be less confident that they would be taller.  We need to look at how we come up with averages.  How confident am I in my decision?

Sometimes you don’t need to test – a major change can be seen as to its impact and it’s really obvious.

Fundamentals of testing include

Sampling

Sampling Size

Variability

Confidence Interval

Types of test include:

Continuous Tests

Binary Tests

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With sampling, you take some set of data and extrapolate that sampling to the population.  If you have a large data sent, you have less variability than if your data set is much smaller.

Conrad is using bell curve slides to talk about sample sizes and confidence levels. There’s no way I’m going to explain them here.

And now it went from bad to worse.  He’s talking about using something called a “TTest” (yes, that’s correct, two “T”s in that so it sounds like  “T-Test”.  Not to be confused with the process of testing green tea vs. black tea.  We’re talking about complex functions and formulas here people.  Way over my pay scale.  And geek-quotient.

What it boils down to is that you need to find out ways to improve the quality of your data by increasing the sample size of your test.  And now I’m thinking – uh, why couldn’t you have just said that in the first place?  But then probably half the attendees here are just eating this stuff up because they’re statistical fanatics.

He says you can use an A/B Testing Confidence Calculator from ABTester.com, which will give you a confidence level assessment based on your test sample size.  And THAT is useful, even to me!  Thanks Dude!

Conrad says there are “tons” of this type of calculator out there as well. (just Google it and you see a lot of opitons)

Seasonal variability – nobody looks for laywers during thanksgiving, so if you test for people who search for lawyers and you do so during Thanksgiving, you have a bad data set.

Pay attention to things that might cause your sampling or your data set to be incorrect due to mistakes or assumptions that aren’t valid!

_____________________________

Next up is John!

I’m going to talk about the community aspect of testing.  As an SEO I want actionable information, I want to isolate myself from sudden changes, and I want to avoid penalties and protect against competition.

These days we’re hearing about better correlations, higher probabilities, super LARGE numbers like 11 million…

Scientific reports are usually supporting claims, like Page Rank Sculpting “Doesn’t Work” or Title tags should be 165 characters, only the first link on a page matters…

The value has shifted from the data to the claim, but that’s marketing, not science.

Scientists go through a peer review process before publication.  As Scientists, you usually can’t “redo” your study or republish your paper.  Promotion / fame is based on citations, respect, publishers protect their own quality score.  All of this is built into the scientific world.

In SEO, we have almost the opposite.  Remarkable claims get the most attention.  Sponsors fund studies.  There’s virtually no peer review.  Success follows attention, not validity, anyone can publish anything on the web, links are cheap and easy.

Instead of saying what’s true, share what you have and let’s ALL determine what’s true.

Remarkable claims backed by weak science draws lots of links, but they tend to be lower quality over time.

Contribute to the science of SEO

Science is slow, boring, not easy, and it’s expensive.  Most scientific experiments don’t produce significant results.  Scientists learn by making mistakes, proving themselves wrong, “We”, never make mistakes.  But every SEO is an experimentalist.

Publish your findings without making any claims.  Describe “What I Did”, “What I Saw”.  Be complete and transparent.  Let your peer community review your data.  Even if it’s not public, give peers access.  They might repeat your experiment.  They’ll provide a citation to your data if they do a write up on it as well.  This linking is very powerful linking.

Make suggestions about the data, but not “hard claims”.  You’re only making honest observation so nobody can dispute it.  Others are likely to promote hard claims on your behalf, as a one-off.

You can earn more valuable inbound links by publishing your observations and separately publish the discussions.  You’ll get more authority sites linking to your data.

You won’t get the social media attention because it’s not wild claims.  but the higher authority links are worth it.

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Next up is Jordan

How do you kill a vampire? What are the two primary ways?  Audience answers stake through the heart, or direct sunlight.  These are the historic beliefs.  More recently, an expert has said that’s wrong.  (He flashes a “Twilight” book cover on the screen. )

How do we deal with this discrepancy?  Do testing yourself.

Now there’s a photo of Matt Cutts up on the screen and he says “Don’t Trust This Guy”.  And a photoshopped photo of Matt’s there now, looking really evil. 

You need to take what others say with a grain of salt.  Every site is different, every competitor situation is different.  You need to test for yourself.

Why do we test?  To help break through the red tape that’s out there, and validate the recommendations and processes we want to go through.  We need the evidence to show what we want to do is the right thing to do.

Testing process:

• Formulate your plan – lay out the steps.
• Execute your test
• Monitor the metrics and reports you determined during the plan
• Share the information.  there are key stakeholders in your organization that need to know the information.  If you can, share it online in the SEO community.
• Maintain consistency for ongoing success.

Measure impact and conversions – use A/B testing with changes on your site and monitor the conversions.  Was there a negative impact on conversions?  If not, you’re safe to move ahead.

Data points to consider:

• Visits or Searches
• Average SERPs (pull data from visitor URL)
• KPIs – your key success metrics

Generate trend reports, and granular data reports.

Example reports – Overall visits, Organic visits, Google Visits, Keyword group level results, all the way down to monitoring individual keyword results over time.  At the deepest level, you can look at results over time for an individual page.

Create a dashboard – to automate the generation of the data, which frees you up to do other work.

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And our last speaker is Branko (Go @Neyne!)

I admire Branko – an SEO scientist who routinely does lab testing of the biological kind!

Some of the things important in science that can be applied to SEO:

First, we want to define the question, usually after we observe something.  The phrase isn’t “Eureka”, it’s usually “oh – that’s funny” – a thought that comes up as we’re observing something.  You don’t have time or the ability to test everything – its important to know what we can test or we can’t test.  PageRank is an example – they can test that in MountainView, but we can’t.  Everything you do on your web site is a potential thing we can test.

Gather information and resources before you test – related blog posts, social media, forums – maybe someone has done this before that you can learn from.  A problem with this is non-standardized terminology – we don’t all use the same words to describe things we test.

Perform an experiment and collect data.  Testing with “nonsensical” terms (non-words) is not really valid.  On the other end, testing for “payday loans” isn’t valid either.

I like to take the third route – phrases that are made up of real words, but aren’t normally phrases.  You’re able to couple changes to your site with changes in rankings.

Multi-directional experiments -I take a site without a link and change it, then look at the results, I’ll then do the reverse – if I see similar results, I have more confidence in the results.

Interpret your data and draw conclusions – does my conclusion agree with expectations?  Does it have an alternative explanation?  Bounce your findings off of others – two heads are better than one.

Remember – there are no definite conclusions.  That should be kept in mind.  It’s a tough reality to live with, but it’s important to be aware of.

Data Analysis- Get a real statistician to look at your data because it can lead to bad examples if you rely on yourself or someone who isn’t an expert.

Avoid personal bias.  We think we see what we do based on our expectations.  Try to erase your expectations before you look at the data.

Go Social!  Some of the best findings I’ve found have come from going social – you’ll learn much more.

SEO Testing Secret Ingredient:

Identify the people who like experiments, buy them a beer – you’ll get much better results and we’ll all enjoy it more!

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Question time!

When you’re doing testing on a moving target, what are the challenges?  The moving target is the algorithm.  How can you isolate that the changes you’ve made are what moves the data?
Branko - my multi-directional method does a pretty good job.  But the title of the whole thing, you’re only increasing the certainty a little bit.

Vanessa - I really liked not only the multi-directional method but doing the test a couple times.

Branko - On a few pages as well.

John - Over time, you find some sites that are representative of content strategies – and you can go to them and see what happened to them.

Vanessa - if you’re looking at all the sites you’re involved with, it’s more likely to not be a coincidence.

Question: Do you want to talk about tests you’ve done that didn’t match expectations?

Branko - A while back it wasn’t well known at the time, but we discovered that you didn’t need quality links, only consistently more links coming in.  That was new to us.  It may not be that way today but it was new and it worked for us.

Question: Do you use external control groups? Do you track other peoples web sites to see if their changes are comparable to yours?

Conrad - Benchmarking competitors can be bad.  We do watch competitors like a hawk, but if you’re studying them, you might stumble into a test, assume that’s something they’re doing not just as a test.

Branko - I do it sometimes when I test links.  I insert a link to a control group that I don’t have control over – if that link behaves as links to my web site, then it’s better ( for my evaluation of my testing).

Question - where are good places people can go to publish this information, and exchange ideas?

John - I joined Twitter only for SEO and over time, I can twitter something and get attention of hundreds of people.  That same thing happens at forums – I like the SEOBook forum – they’re hardcore people with being serious.  In the science world, we form working groups all the time.  When you meet people with common areas, take advantage of that.

Branko - a study that came out on the Distilled blog – they published excels with data that anybody could take and study and we joined forces – and that’s the whole point of that.

Question: Can you each briefly give ideas for setting up SEO testing environments?

John - If you’re beginning, go into Google – Analytics, Webmaster Tools – put them to use

Branko - The problem with testing – it’s isolated from the places we want to be at.  I would make sure you’re constantly aware of what’s happening on YOUR web site – or isolating sections on your site and doing experiments – that teaches you more.

Jordan - if you can’t set up a completely controlled environment – set aside testing areas of your site.

Conrad - Make sure you and the people you are sharing the data with are using statistical standards.

And that’s it!

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. So You Want To Test SEO? is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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INDUSTRY OUTRAGE LEADS TO OFFICIAL APOLOGY

Outrage over TOPSEOs deceptive business practices has been brewing for a couple years, and came to a head over the past couple months.  As a result of the SEO industry’s coming together with one voice in opposition to Jeev Trika’s deceptive game playing and the seriously mounting complaints from both industry professionals and business owners who had been deceived, I reached out to Jeev in an attempt to get his side of the story and wrote about it on April 26th.   Three days later, TOPSEOs issued an official apology press release, vowing to change.

TOPSEOs ANNOUNCES THEY’VE CHANGED THEIR WAYS – BUT HAVE THEY?

That was more than a full month ago, so a review of their claimed pennance and changes is due. Especially since they issued a subsequent press release claiming they’ve changed their ways.  Let’s look at the facts and then you can decide for yourselves whether TOPSEOs is a reformed criminal, or Jeev Trika was full of shit.

FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS, MAYBE

One of the biggest complaints that came out of this was how TOPSEOs listed countless companies in their database that were not paying for leads, and when someone would click on a link to contact that company, it would actually be redirected to paying members without the knowledge of the innocent site visitor.

In their “we’ve changed” press release, they state

Some of the changes implemented include of: (i) enabling the contact request for all companies across the five regional sites without the agency being required to sign up for the leads service, (ii) contact requests within articles, case studies, research materials, and jobs have been disabled, (iii) the links within the articles sections have been enabled, and (iv) the website response times have been further optimized.

At the time this article is being written, I can confirm that contact requests within articles, case studies and research materials have, in fact been removed.

As far as contact requests being redirected or not, I’m still testing this and will need to report on my findings only after I have done enough testing to truly confirm this, a daunting task given how vast their database of listings is.

LOOK AT US – WE’RE BETTER NOW

IF my ongoing study of the bait and switch issue proves them truthful in this aspect, I highly encourage Jeev Trika to tout that fact prominently on the TOPSEOs web site.

Except it might have to read:

Since 2002, one of our primary business models has been based on bait and switch tactics.  But we heard the outcry, and we no longer pull that bullshit on unsuspecting business owners!  Sure, we still deceive you in countless other ways, but hey, at least now we’re no longer performing the most egregious of criminal activity, so please – cut us some slack!

NEXT – THE BAD BAD BAD

Exhibit #1 TOPSEOS THEFT OF ARTICLES

An article by Marty Weintraub originally posted at SearchEngineWatch on February 22nd, 2008 continues to live on in its entirety at TOPSEOs, with no original article attribution, and presented to TOPSEOs readers as if it’s an article originally posted TO TOPSEOs by Marty.

An article by Jill Whalen originally posted at HighRankings.com (Jill’s site), on May 30th, 2004, continues to live on in its entirety at TOPSEOs, with no indication that this is a stolen article or that it was originally posted at Jill’s site.

UPDATE – Jill just notified me that in that article, they are, in fact, properly attributing the article to her, and linking back to her site. As such, she would not call that infringing. So we can give TOPSEOs a break on that one article.

Yet that leaves all these other articles, and God knows how many more I haven’t uncovered…

A Case Study by Michael Gray, origionally posted to his Wolf-Howl web site, continues to live on, in its entirety at TOPSEOs, as though he wrote it for their site.

Articles by Loren Baker, posted to SearchEngineJournal.com, continue to live on at TOPSEOs, direct theft of SearchEngineJournal.com content. And THAT pisses me off, in a more personal way because I am an author at SEJ, and SEJ article scrapers disgust me.

Articles by Ann Smarty, also posted to SearchEngineJournal.com, live on, in their scraped content entirety at TOPSEOs. Hey Jeev Trika, didn’t you get it just now when I expressed how much you piss me off?  Well, now you’re just aching for me to digitally bitch slap you aren’t you?

Other articles originally posted elsewhere by industry professionals continue to reside on the TOPSEOs site and presented as original to TOPSEOs which is both deceptive and in violation of copyright law, such as this article by Chris Boggs, still on the TOPSEOs site.

Do I go on? We’re talking about articles by Matt McGee, Joanna Lord, Andy Beard, the list goes on and on and on…

So clearly, TOPSEOs continues their deceptive practices.

ARTICLE REMOVAL COUNTER ARGUMENT

Some people believe it should be the responsibility of the author of an article to contact TOPSEOs and have their scraped content removed.

To be fair to Jeev, they have set up an article removal request site, where writers can submit a request to have their scraped content removed from TOPSEOs system.  While I applaud them for doing so, nowhere on their actual site do they provide this link that I can find.  Nowhere on their site do they communicate in any easy to find manner, that removal of unintentionally scraped content is even possible.  No, the only reason I know about this method is because I saw that one-time press release.

The vast majority of article writers would most likely NOT have seen that one-time release.  And hell – they don’t even list their apology or “we’ve changed” releases on their own site.  Go figure.

WHY SCRAPED CONTENT REMOVAL IS TOPSEOs RESPONSIBILITY

As far as I am concerned, I call BULLSHIT on Jeev Trika, because they know damned well that they scrape content.  It would NOT take a rocket scientist to know which articles have been posted directly to their site and which ones they stole.  And since they continue to leverage their ability to deceive unsuspecting business owners, I say the onus should be on TOPSEOs, not article authors.  Especially since they stated, on the record,

This content was identified, and is in the process of being removed.

So yes, as far as I am concerned, either they lied when they say they identified the content, or they’re incompetent fools who have no right to exist.  Take your pick.

Exhibit #2 TOPSEOS BULLSHIT REMOVAL EFFORTS

Conducting a search for “Jill Whalen” at TOPSEOs reveals several “press release” and several “article” titles and snippets under both the High Rankings banner and Jill Whalen as author.  When clicking on the link on these to “View Article”, you are redirected to the TOPSEOs home page now.  So at least they’ve removed at least some of the full articles.  But by listing these articles in the search results it means they continue to leach off of the hard work of true industry professionals.

TOPSEOs continues to deceive and leach off of the SEO industry

Similar entries continue to exist for other industry professionals, including Matt Cutts, Loren Baker, Matt McGee, and who knows how many others…

Exhibit #3 TOPSEOs CONTINUES TO LEACH OFF HIGH PROFILE INDUSTRY LISTINGS

A search at TOPSEOs for “High Rankings” lists several companies, including Jill Whalen’s company, High Rankings.  Clicking on the link in the bottom right to “View Company” causes a “302 Found” redirect to the TOPSEOs home page.  So they no longer have a page on Jill’s company on their site, but they still list it in the search results, and redirect that sucker to their home page.

High Rankings Company Profile at TOPSEOs

Exhibit #4 TOPSEOs FALSE CLAIMS

The Independent Authority Lie

Even after Jeev Trika vowed to change their ways, they continue to display a claim that they’re an “Independent authority”. In fact, they mostly claim they are “THE” independent authority.

Again, I call bullshit.  If the vast majority of companies you rank actually pay you insane fees for the right to be ranked, you are NOT an independent authority. You have a VESTED INTEREST in ranking those companies.  You are NOT providing a fair, unbiased and impartial opinion.  This is classic BULLSHIT.

The 4000 Firms Analyzed Lie

To this day, TOPSEOs maintains a claim on their home page where Entrepreneur magazine quoted them saying that they have analyzed over 4,000 firms.  Where do I begin with this one?

First of all, they use the Entrepreneur logo as some sort of “proof of truth” banner.  Kind of like their own “Best in the industry” badges.  In fact, this is no proof of truth or trustworthiness at all, it’s purely a marketing ploy to deceive site visitors who don’t know better.

Then there’s the minor detail they fail to disclose in any real way, that many companies they claimed to have reviewed, turned out to NOT have been reviewed.  Like Vertical Measures, as well as numerous other companies who’s representatives spoke up in the various Sphinn threads and on their own articles across the web over the past couple months.

Jeev Trika never disputed these claims. Not in his interview with me, or in their official apology press release.

So I call BULLSHIT on the 4000 firms claim.

Highly Questionable Rankings

To this day, many of the companies that have been well documented as to be highly questionable, and where actual clients have accounted where they posted complaints directly on the TOPSEOs web site, only to have those complaints mysteriously disappear without resolution, remain highly “ranked”.  Some companies that have been ranked, are, upon a simple lifting of the hood, companies that use black hat techniques to achieve whatever results they achieve.

No, we don’t believe that TOPSEOs has actually done proper, reasonable, or respectable “independent authority” due diligence in their “ranking” process at all.  Not in the least.

So I call BULLSHIT on the claim of ranking companies as “BEST” anything.

Exhibit #5 BULLSHIT DAMAGE CONTROL

Let’s face it.  When a murderous criminal is caught with blood splattered all over their body, gun shot residue spread across their hand, and the crime scene isn’t properly scrubbed of all DNA trace evidence, it’s pretty damned hard for that criminal to erase all traces of their criminal activity, let alone perform damage control.

I do, however, give Jeev Trika credit for trying to pretend like they’re covering their asses in a sufficient enough manner.

Take, for example, the now visible “FULL DISCLOSURE” button that appears at the bottom of every page.

Of course, when I zoom in on that little area of the site all the way at the bottom of pages, that green button jumps out at you doesn’t it?

But when you actually go to their site, and you’re looking at the page like most humans do, and your eyes are bleeding from absorbing all the primary content, that green button becomes a blur among a flurry of bottom feeder links and buttons.

FINALLY – THE DOWNRIGHT UGLY

So okay, we already know it’s a BULLSHIT ASSHAT way to skirt the disclosure requirement that was called for in our outcry.  Personally, I called for an obvious and easy to find disclosure throughout and across the site.  This isn’t even CLOSE to obvious or easy to find when you’re overwhelmed with trying to focus on primary content areas.  It’s not in any of the top navigation links, there’s no icons or text directly inside the content areas.  It’s buried at the very bottom in a blur.

But let’s at least look at it to see what they’ve come up with, shall we?

There’s a lot of marketing bullshit about how they do their rankings and this little gem:

The rankings are strictly our opinions based on our research process.

Okay – so we should believe their ability to be trustworthy why?

Oh yeah – they’re the Independent Authority!  (BULLSHIT)

THE “WE DON’T NEED TO BE HONEST” LOOPHOLE

The rankings are usually measured on a series of scores that we assign on five factors within each category.  The scores for each factor are assigned based on our analysis. Only the top scoring agencies make a given list.

Wait – USUALLY?  What the fuck does THAT mean?

It means they have the right to list any fucking douchebag asshat scumbag company they damned well please.  Without otherwise TELLING you that’s what they did.  Because they tell you right there on that disclosure page.  So FUCK YOU if you were hoping for fairness and independent trustworthy rankings.

AT LEAST THEY GET A LITTLE HONEST

They go on to say  in the disclosure page

We charge a standard fee from agencies and tool developers for our time to evaluate.

So there you have it – an actual truthful statement that they get paid to rank sites.  Isn’t that nice of Jeev Trika for actually being honest about how rankings are bought and paid for?

LETS GET REAL – ITS A BULLSHIT PLOY

AFTER they close out the “disclosure” page content, below the “Summary” and the “Sincerely” bullshit closing, they go on to provide a p.s.!

P.S.:   Our lawyers advised us that we should say a few more things…

Users are recommended to do their own research and investigation before engaging services with any company.  User agrees to not hold topseos.com and/or e-ventures, LLC and/or any members and/or any managers and/or any of our partners and/or suppliers liable from any decisions they take. Furthermore, e-ventures, LLC is not liable for any statements, representations, descriptions, comments, or opinions posted on the Site.  e-ventures, LLC cannot guarantee the accuracy, integrity, or quality of Rankings. Under no circumstances will e-ventures, LLC or any third-party providers of the Rankings be liable in any way for any Ranking, including, but not limited to, any errors or omissions in any Ranking/s, or any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of the use of the Ranking/s.

(bolding by me for emphasis)

Do you grasp what that paragraph means?

It means they have the right to lie, deceive and otherwise spit out the most insanely nonsensical, totally non-independent, non authoritative, non-trustworthy “rankings” they want to, for whatever reason they see fit, and if you don’t like it, FUCK YOU.

I especially like the GO FUCK YOURSELVES IF YOU EXPECT QUALITY RANKINGS line:

e-ventures, LLC cannot guarantee the accuracy, integrity, or quality of Rankings.

Isn’t that just fucking special?

DRIVING THE FUCK YOU ATTITUDE HOME

As good as all the above facts are, this line from the disclosure page really drives it home:

By developing and posting such rankings, topseos.com makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or factual basis of the rankings

Translated, this line says “we make no claim that any claim we make about rankings is even fucking real or factual.

See?  Their lawyers insisted that they admit somewhere on their site that they really don’t have any need to honor their bullshit.

LOOKING FOR OPINIONS BY “AWARD” WINNERS

Bruce Clay Badges

I’ve made several attempts to reach business owners whose companies have actually placed “BEST IN…” badges on their sites or in their marketing materials.

The one question I ask each time is why they choose to display their badges and fail to disclose along side them that they’re just bought and paid for, not truly independent awards (as in J.D. Power or Consumer Reports type ratings).

It’s a simple, fair and reasonable question given how some of these badge holders are very high profile companies, like Bruce Clay, Inc., for example – a company that touts quite proudly, their own SEO Code of Ethics. RIGHT BELOW THEIR TOPSEOS Badge.

So they’re either also bullshitting the public, and that means they’re in collusion with TOPSEOs, or they’ve been duped by Jeev Trika.

As of the time of the writing of this article, only one company has had the balls to step up to the plate and discuss the whole TOPSEOs “ranking” bullshit.  They no longer display any of their “awards” based on a position they’re taking that TOPSEOs is in violation of FTC regulations regarding endorsements.

Sadly, not one other company has had the balls or guts to step forward to defend their asshat bullshit badges.  I can only assume the reason for this is that they don’t want to get their business dragged into the public maelstrom or the vortex that this has become.

Except by the mere fact that they have chosen to ignore my inquiries, and they continue to display their bullshit phony badges, they’re complicit in the TOPSEOs deceptive practices we’re talking about. Especially given that they’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars paying for the ongoing right to display that crap.

It’s disgraceful.

And I highly encourage anyone who ever comes across a company displaying or promoting their TOPSEOs badge to run.  Away.  As fast as possible.  And not look back…

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. TOPSEOs Continues Deceptive Practices is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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Ken from SEOHonesty has agreed to take the site down.  Read his comments in the comment thread below…

_____________________________________________________

Hot on the heels of the TOPSEOs apology to the community, and their vow to clean up their act, yet another company has decided they can create an SEO recommendation service and profit from it while doing so in a way that is severely flawed.  This one goes by the name SEOHonesty – and you’re not going to believe how it came about…

It seems the person behind SEOHonesty, Ken Styles, is also connected with WebHelpNetwork – he’s listed at the top of their About page.  Notice those icons for social media? Makes sense they’re there, since Ken’s the guy in charge of WebHelpNetwork’s social media efforts.  Except none of the links works at the time of this article.

And the links in the footer of that site?  uh, they go to 404 Not Found error pages.  Which means the people at WebHelpNetwork need Web Help.  Oh. My. God.  I’m going to vomit…

WebHelpNetwork is the group behind SEOHonesty…
I know this because the SEOHonesty page has a testimonial on it.

Ooops.  That’s a “Test” Testimonial – you know – the kind used by developers when they’re just building a site before it’s launched.  And it’s supposed to be replaced before they go live…

And the ABOUT page at SEOHonesty – Ken and Darryl are listed there, just like they’re listed at WebHelpNetwork.  First names only, even…

Darrels Bio on WebHelpNetwork

The SEOHonesty Team

Ken Styles – International Man of Mystery

Just so we’re clear here, Ken Styles is not only the guy behind @SEOHonesty and @WebHelpNetwork, so far we have learned he’s also the guy behind @SEOWebHelp, @BoxedDesign, @deskofken, and SEOMeetupPhoenix… so apparently he’s a real SEO / Social Media guru… (insert vomiting sounds here)…

SEOHonesty – WTF?

SEOHonesty is a brand new offering – just launched today, as a matter of fact.  Their offering, as stated on the home page:

Seo and Internet Marketing Approved!

We’re a network of recommended companies in the industry. You can recommend them, and each city will have more than 1 company so it doesn’t appear we play favorites. We’re not trying to be control ethics, just help you find hard working and honest companies to help with your projects.

(Yes, they actually spell SEO as “Seo” . On their home page.  Either they’re afraid that Rhea Drysdale is going to sue them if they use “SEO”, or this is the first red flag in terms of their inability to provide quality content, let alone a real and worthwhile SEO recommendation service… )

Well hell.  A “network of recommended companies in the industry…” Really?  Well, since it’s a brand new site, the only “recommended companies” are, uh…. I can’t find any yet.  Thank God.

Not Trying To Control Ethics

WTF?  Not trying to control ethics?  What the hell does that mean?  – It means that Ken Styles happened to listen in on the WebCology radio show this week where we talked about services just like SEOHonesty, and figured that before they launch this crappy service that’s just begging for abuse, that he should throw in a reference to ethics in the SEO industry, so as to prove to visitors that they’re different than TOPSEOs.

How do I know that’s where that came from?

Because I got a copy of Ken’s promotional email and you won’t BELIEVE what it says, but you’ll have to wait a bit for that.

First, I need to point out why this is

EXACTLY like TOPSEOs in some very critical ways…

1.  If your company is “recommended” by someone, and if you then want to be listed, you have to pay a one time NON-REFUNDABLE fee of $49.  Okay, so it’s not the THOUSANDS that TOPSEOs charges.  Yet it’s a fee nonetheless. And it’s non-refundable!  Wow. Can you imagine, you get duped into thinking this is a worthy service, you pay our fee (hell – at such a low fee, who wouldn’t be willing to give it a try, right? ) and then what if you find out the service sucks? Or the service puts out deceptive information, or does bait and switch like TOPSEOs was doing?  Well too bad on you – you’re out your $49…

Again, it’s  a dirt-cheap amount in many ways, but if 500 or 5000 companies sign up…

2.  More Fees To Profit From

And just like TOPSEOs, Ken has come up with a way to make even more money

SEOHonesty Multiple Fee Structure

3.  Awards.  Yes, you read that right -  SEOHonesty will give out Awards, just like TOPSEOs does.  Okay so it’s not in the same exact manner as TOPSEOs, but it’s “awards” nonetheless.  Things you can paste all over your web site and marketing materials – you know – to show how you’re better than the competition (because we all know – if two companies appear identical in all manners, but one has won “awards”, clearly they’re for me!)

SEOHonesty Awards

4.  “All members on this community site are recommended by other companies or You! We’ll find out what we can and if approved, YOU can write a review about them! You can recommend anyone you think is a good, reputable Internet Marketeer.”

That’s a quote from the SEOHonesty site.  Which means first of all, that they can’t actually spell “Marketer”, unless they’re referring to modern day pirates, or perhaps they’re referring to the SEO industry’s version of the 3 Musketeers, I’m not sure which.

But more importantly, there’s that “We’ll find out what we can…” aspect.  What does that mean?  They’re going to try and dig up info on a company that’s nominated?  Are they going to call companies they think are clients of that nominee?  Do an FBI Background check?  Exactly what will they do?

And YOU can write a review about the company you nominate.  Even if you’re a shill – an insider at that very company, posing  as an independent 3rd party…

5.  As a nominated company, you have to provide two client contacts – so they (SEOHonesty) can verify you really are as good as you say you are.   Which sounds a lot like the whole Charles Preston game doesn’t it?

Yeah, yeah,  I know – there are many different “independent” review entities in all sorts of industries, and verifying client satisfaction is standard stuff right?  Well, just like with Charles Preston, this is NOT an independent entity – it’s people in our industry who offer their own services… So guess what – that would be a big….

FAIL!

MORE SCUM IN THE CESSPOOL

Why this brand new site appears to be even worse than scum is because of all the above, but even more than that, check out the logo.  Yeah see those devil’s horns on the SEO portion?  That immediately implies that people should first and foremost think of the SEO industry as a whole as a bunch of evil thieves, looking to drag your innocent web site into the depths of hell…

Oh – and that Angel’s halo? That obviously implies that the only salvation you, the unsuspecting site owner has if you’re ever going to be able to be found organically in the SERP’s is to trust SEOHonesty as your source for legitimate SEO companies to hire…

HOLY CRAP CAN IT GET ANY MORE FUCKED?

Please – let’s be quite clear here.  This service can be gamed so effortlessly I could have my 12 year old niece pull a fast one on Ken and his band of hooligans.  So there’s no chance IN hell that SEOHonesty could EVER be trusted to provide reliable information on which SEO companies to hire and which to avoid…

WHERE THIS GETS DOWNRIGHT SICKENING

Okay, so we’ve got this brand new site – and even though it’s in “Alpha” right now, the functionality on the site shows that it didn’t get built overnight.  Some serious thought went into this, and time was needed to program the functionality.  But guess what? Ken listened in on the WebCology show this week. And as he listened, he figured there was some serious changes he had to make to the offering before launch.  Because he wanted to prove to the SEO community that he’s not like TOPSEOs, let alone Charles Preston…

Here’s how it went down in the past couple days:

Ken and his cohorts work furiously to get SEOHonesty launched.  He happens to hear the WebCology radio show where me, Edward Lewis, Dave Harry and Jim Hedger discuss Charles Preston and TOPSEOs.  He realizes he has to spin the offering a different way, and that learning about Charles Preston – and how Charles failed to get community buy-in,  Ken comes up with an ingenious way  to do that.  To win the hearts and minds of the SEO community, before launch….

How Do I Know This?

I know this because an anonymous source sent me this email…

Hi XXXXXXXX!

I have a new site launching May 1 (or 3) and wanted to share this:

There has been lots of talk about how companies are calling “paid” SEO and SEM companies the “Best SEO company”, and ranking them. I was on webmaster radio today hearing everyone mention other top SEO companies and the way they were handling the processes, and the ethics involved (in their opinions). Everyone had a different view on it. We changed our site a little to clarify that we’re not going in certain directions. I received many thoughts from SEO members about their feelings on participation and how they wanted to sit back and make sure we were accepted by the community first. Even though they had a great interest to join or recommend a friend.

I have some good things going for me (I think) lol -
1. Seohonesty.com was started by SeoWebHelp which some in the industry know and trust the brand and possibly me.
2. I have been chatting with some top SEO names to ensure we don’t come across the same way that those other companies did. Just to get their thoughts so we can make our focus more towards the “recommendations” process and not the “pay us and you will be known as the best ever” process.

We are different. We’re not trying to control ethics, we just have a catchy domain name. Check out how everything is worded on the site when you get a chance.

Recommending some of your SEO SEM or Social Media friends just gets them a recommendation which has nothing to do with their involvement in the site. (I say this because of the “SEO members feelings on participation until we are accepted by the community”.)

Your recommendation of another professional suggests he or she is a good person on your opinion – like when you make a connection on Linkedin. Your clients can even go on and suggest him or your company. If he later becomes a member, they can leave testimonials too!

We never say anyone is the TOP or BEST of anything. We are just a community of recommended SEO and SEM people that offer quality service.

With all that – the reason I’m emailing is to ask in your help with getting my site launched. If you mind spreading the love or sharing anything with others, or even recommending some friends of yours on the site – bit.ly/seosuggest

I really need this to be a community event.

You can cite if you need to. I would love to do an email interview too if you want something fun to post on your blog.

Thanks for any help you can give!
- Ken Styles

Oh. No. You. Didn’t.!

When I read that letter from my source, I had to hold back from spewing last nights dinner all over my monitor. I mean, here we just raked TOPSEOs all across the hot coals, forcing them to issue an Apology Press Release.  And that on the heels of shutting Charles Preston down permanently….

And then we discussed it on the air!

Yet Ken is apparently so arrogant, or so clueless (the complete lack of quality content, poor grammar, mis-spellings and dysfunctional links across his multiple sites tells me its’ the latter rather than the former, but hey, that’s just a guess…) that he thinks he can still launch his new site, and change the spin so it doesn’t smell like the rat that it is…

I have been chatting with some top SEO names

Yeah? Who?  I am dying to find out!

There may, in fact, be some people in our community (I’m betting it’s really AFFILIATE NETWORK people, or maybe SEO people who see how easily this can be gamed, or both.. .

But I’ll tell you this Ken, you have NO CLUE as to how utterly wrong you were in assuming you could get the right mix of industry people to buy into your horseshit.

I may be wrong on this one.  But I doubt it. The conversation will unfold in the coming days and we’ll find out though…

Because I can guarantee you, I know of a few industry people who are already furious at your arrogance, and a few who are just laughing at your ineptitude…

AN OPEN INVITATION TO KEN

SO – Ken – I would really love to speak with you on this one.  Let you give your own take on it…

And let the insanity begin!

___________________________________________

UPDATE – Ken sent me an email just now…

You are missing the point with the site sir. We are in no way trying to be the ethics police. This site is purely to help people in the SEO, Social Media and Internet Marketing industries get found online and recommended by their clients.

Please read through the site before writing harsh words about it. If you personally see anything that resembles we are trying to be the ethics police for SEO, please inform us through the email here and I will be more than happy to remove it.

And my reply:

No

I’m not saying you’re trying to be the “Ethics Police”.  Apparently YOU missed the point of the whole Charles Preston and TOPSEOs effort.  You can’t properly ensure your directory is pure, or accurate. It’s too easily scammed.  And there’s nothing stopping YOU from polluting it with companies that YOU choose to, for your own hidden financial gain.  Forget it.  It won’t fly.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. SEOHonesty- Scam or Clueless? You be the judge is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. SEO Industry InfoGraphic is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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rankings bought and paid for

There’s been a flurry of renewed activity in the past few days regarding the fact that TOPSEOs has been caught using deceptive business practices in their operation.  Apparently someone at TOPSEOs, perhaps Jeev Trika himself, finally felt that enough pressure was being applied, because yesterday morning (April 28th), a press release was posted through PRWeb.com where TOPSEOs issued an official apology “to the community” for “confusion”, and where they vow “Changes to the Site”.

So did Jeev Trika finally get the message, and are they really going to implement the changes I called for in my article Monday as well as those required by Chris Elwell from Third Door Media? Will they go as far as Edward Lewis thinks they should?  Or is this just another marketing ploy?

Let’s Break It Down

Let’s look at the “official” word from TOPSEO’s and Jeev Trika in this release.

Scraped Articles

In a review of topseos.com’s operations, it appears there was a challenge with specific content having been placed on topseos.com/~/ This content was identified, and is in the process of being removed.

This, of course, refers to the fact that they had been displaying articles, without permission, some by highly reputable people in our industry.  While it’s nice to think they’ll actually delete those, as they legally should delete them, I have concerns about this actually happening.

How can we be sure that all of the illegally published content will be removed?  We’re talking about a lot of articles, across all of their sister sites and from their Visibility magazine.  That’s a huge amount of content that needs to be culled and removed.

Who’s going to know that this has been achieved across the board?

Scraped Profiles

topseos.com will also be changing its policy for SEO vendors who have not responded to requests for participation on topseos.com’s either as a sponsor or non-sponsor. topseos.com will be removing their content, and writing a brief synopsis about each company consistent with safe harbor practices used on leading review sites in all industries.

Really?  Out of the tens of thousands of profiles you have, you mean you’re going to remove the vast majority of them?

Will you then change all your banners, and marketing materials to reduce the false claims you used up til now proclaiming things like “Over 4000 firms analyzed”?

Will you then notify all of the news outlets you duped, and who’s references you make liberal use of in your marketing materials? (Like that reference to Entrepreneur Magazine you so prominently display on your home page?

Bait & Switch

topseos.com’s lead program is being altered, because despite the disclosure given to participating companies, there still was confusion amongst some companies, and topseos.com has decided to change the system to enable contact forms for all vendors listed on the site.  This means that if a potential client requests to contact the vendor via the profile on topseos.com, the email listed on the profile will receive the contact in real time.  This modification will be enabled within 7-10 days.

This refers to the fact that companies who didn’t pony up the thousands of dollars a month TOPSEOs charges to participate in the leads program, never, in fact, in at least some cases, received those contacts, let alone any notice inviting them to join in order to get the lead.

So what they’re saying now is that from now on (effective within 7-10 days), if a visitor clicks the contact form for any company that is NOT paying for leads, that contact form will go directly to the email on file for that company.  This also implies that this lead will NEVER end up going to members who pay for leads.  That would be refreshing, since the way it works now is a lead gets sent to 7 or 8 of those paying members chosen at the discretion of TOPSEO’s.  Which was one of my most serious concerns given how it deceives site visitors, and it causes undue harm to companies not paying for leads because site visitors were led to believe that company would get that contact info, and failing to respond then implied that company was less than professional.

Ranking That Never Took Place

While it is true that vendors do pay for vetting, topseos has always disclosed there are fees involved to be vetted to enable ranking.

That line is a very disturbing claim, because some vendors were initially ranked, WITHOUT paying, only to end up with lower rankings in an attempt to strong-arm those companies into paying the fees TOPSEOs insisted on.  So that statement is patently false.  A lie.  Verified by testimony from multiple sources, all documented publicly.

Deception Of Consumers

In the interest of consumer’s, topseos will more prominently include this detailed disclosure throughout its site.

The need for clear disclosure was another one of the action items I called for in Monday’s article.  So it’s good to see they’re committing to that in writing.  How they go about this will prove an interesting study in itself.  The key here is that though there were disclosures buried on the site a couple clicks down, it was NEVER clear to the consumer performing a search within the site or directory.

A Sincere Apology?

Jeev Trika, Managing Partner of topseos.com said, “We sincerely apologize to the community, both consumers and vendors, for the confusion caused. We deeply regret them. We have learned from our mistakes, vow to fix them to even better, more transparently educate the consumer, and with our forthcoming changes hope to provide an even more valuable, product to the SEO industry, and marketplace moving forward.

Well heck – that’s a direct response to the outstanding footwork that Edward Lewis has put in on this endeavor, and exactly what Chris Elwell called for – an apology.  And it also responds to my direct call to Jeev in that last article for these exact changes to be made.

SEO Community Raised The Alarm

I also want to thank SEO’s around the world, both sponsors and non-sponsors alike, for suggestions about making topseos.com site an even more detailed, and credible resource for all.

You’re welcome Jeev. Though to be clear, we never said we thought TOPSEOs was a credible source.  In fact, we’ve consistently stated that we believe TOPSEOs is at best, a sham, at worst, a scam.  So if the changes you state are made, you may possibly one day become a credible source.

More Changes Must Take Place

While all the claims of reform sound good, in just the past 24 hours I’ve learned you’ve been deleting legitimate negative ratings from your site.

Deleting Legitimate Complaints = AssHattery

What gives you the right to remove negative comments?  According to at least one person, their complaints were removed multiple times, without having had proper explanation provided let alone satisfaction. Edward Lewis has been tracking other instances of this nonsense, so it’s not just one case.  Which means its a part of the overall pattern of deception and intentional manipulation for financial gain.

So for all the changes you claim Jeev, this one’s a new one you better have a valid explanation for because it’s a big one.

Member Badge Abuse

Given that badges are bought, the fact that members use the statement “Rated Best___” is also misleading.  The more I think about this one the more I believe the entire badge program needs to change and the actual badges need to make it crystal clear that these do NOT come from an independent unbiased authority.  If it was an open rating system that truly rated thousands of companies, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

But since the vast majority of companies in any given category are NOT actually rated, AT ALL, it’s a bogus claim and consumers visiting member sites that see that badge don’t know that given the design of the current badges, and clearly members spin the badge as if it was that which it is not.

Since TOPSEOs are the ones who created the foundation for this, and actively encourage members to market their companies based on this lie, it’s up to TOPSEOs to find a way to change this culture they themselves created.

Abuse Of The Press

Too many references exist that claim organizations like Entrepreneur, CNN, and SmartMoney have all given TOPSEOs high marks for their “independent” authority. They even tout the fact that they were interviewed by American Airlines for AA’s in-flight radio a while back. Heck, Jeev has enjoyed being interviewed a number of times within our own industry…. Knowing full well that his message of deception would go out to industry professionals, all with the intent of luring in companies.

And if these media outlets were used to unknowingly propagate TOPSEOs deceptive business model, this has to be addressed.  Equating TOPSEOs to be among such notable organizations as Good Housekeeping, J.D. Power & Associates, and Consumers Digest  is deplorable.  Something needs to be done to address this.

Perhaps it means they contact the major news organizations, Webmaster Raido, and the like directly, and request new interviews.  That would help.

And how about putting this admittance and forgiveness request press release on your actual site?  You seem to have conveniently left it off your own site…

What About All The Other Sites?

Now that this release has been published, it clearly acknowledges wrongdoing, and claims change is on the way.  Though it only references TOPSEOs.com, not their other sister sites around the world, let alone their Lawyer “ratings” site, or their Retirement community “ratings” site, nor their Magazine, or any other web property they own.  So that too will prove to be interesting to observe.

And ultimately, given how many companies have taken advantage of these paid-for ratings to make false claims about being the best in our industry, the question remains – is it all a little too little, and a little too late?

We shall see, indeed.

Regardless Of Outcome

Regardless of the ultimate outcome here, it’s pretty obvious now that Edward is to be commended for starting the ball rolling on this one and documenting as ceaselessly as he has.  And everyone in the community who has spoken up should stand proud that we’re all contributing to help clean up the SEO cesspool.

We’ll Be Watching

It’s also important to communicate that one press release that has a lot of marketing spin in it, and one outright lie, is not, itself, enough to compensate for the tremendous harm TOPSEOs and Jeev Trika have perpetrated on the business world.

And while a number of people are already calling for them to shut down altogether, I’m leaning in that direction, however to be perfectly fair, I’m at least willing to play the waiting game for a short bit of time.  Just to see exactly what they do and how comprehensive the changes are.  So just beware Jeev – we’ll be watching.

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Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. TOPSEOs Apologizes – Legit or more Deceptive Business? is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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The TOPSEOs discussion (mostly industry leaders and participants calling for TOPSEOs to stop their deceptive marketing practices) has been raging for a while now. Not long after this all started, I attempted to contact Jeev Trika, one of the owners of the company.  At first, I did this with a direct email to Jeev via his LinkedIn account.  When I got no response to that after 2 weeks, I called them and was actually able to talk with Jeev himself.  It turns out that Jeev not only stands firm in his view that they have a legitimate business model, but he even told me he sees this as just a witch hunt out to smear a good business.

My Apologies For The Delay

Before I continue I need to apologize for the lengthy delay in the time between that call and this article.  The fact is that I have a life outside my blogging.  Go figure.  Sometimes I’m swamped with client work.  Other times, personal life takes over.  In any case, even though it’s now been a couple weeks since that call, I think this is still a timely article, and as a follow-up to my own original article.

Especially since Third Door Media has most recently contacted TOPSEOs and demanded they cease and desist with not only their blatant scraping of the legitimate content created by Search Marketing industry professionals, but that they remove the SMX logo from the TOPSEOs site, as they have used that without permission.

And, of course, more companies have come out with complaints against TOPSEOs, a number of which can be found in the comment threads over at Sphinn.

A Desire To Hear The Other Side

Okay – so I called TOPSEOs and asked to speak with Jeev Trika directly, because hey – nobody from their company has had the willingness to participate in a legitimate discussion about their business practices.  And rather than just being one of the people who raises a concern based on personal opinion or just because several complaints have shown up, I figured I’d get Jeev’s take on this whole thing.

Jeev Sidesteps A Desire For Accuracy

Now mind you, I’m not a reporter.  I don’t have professional journalism training.  And I’m not an investigative journalist nor a private investigator.  So I didn’t know exactly how to go about this.  But I figured I would want to be as accurate in my reporting on this conversation as possible.  And so I invited Jeev to either answer a series of questions by email, to get his replies in writing (can’t get much more accurate in quoting someone than that) or perhaps we could do this over Skype and record it, for later transcription.

Jeev laughed at both of those suggestions.  And declined them as well.

Now, on the one hand, that decision can be seen as an innocent choice.  On the other, given the situation we’re dealing with here, it could also be seen as Jeev not being willing to be quoted on the record with any of his responses to my questions – so that he could later deny everything.

So given the fact that this was purely a verbal conversation, I can not guarantee that everything I state as being attributed to Jeev is his actual words.  All I can do is my best at paraphrasing and offering my own opinion on what I felt came out of that call.  It’s not ideal, but this isn’t a court-room either, so it will have to do.

The Court Of Public Opinion

Okay so this isn’t a court of law.  We’re not going to get all of the facts, presented as pure facts, when it comes to TOPSEOs official corporate stance on all of this.  As a result of their unwillingness to provide an official response, as much as Jeev might not like the altnerative, it’s the alternative we have to go by – the court of public opinion.  So here goes…

Jeev Shouts Witch Hunt, Tries To Evade Reality

When we first started talking, Jeev acknowledged having read the original Sphinn article, as well as my own original article.  He summed all of that up as being a witch hunt perpetrated by a competitor of his (Edward, who runs SEOConsultants.com – he (Jeev) really was clear on painting the discussion as an unwarranted attack on his business.  He even pointed me to an old article that was written a few years ago where that article painted Edward in less than stellar light.

Oh – Look – a Shiny Object

Personally, I read that article but will not link to it here.  Not because I have any desire to prop up Edward as a saint or some such nonsense.  Instead, I won’t because this discussion isn’t about Edward Lewis.  It’s about Jeev Trika, TOPSEOs and the now growing list of complaints about their company.  If Jeev Trika wants to try and get us to discount the entirety of the complaint base due to one person’s participation, that’s not going to fly with me.

The Link Bait Tactic

I need to say that overall, Jeev was quite pleasant to speak with – and communicated both an appreciation for my being the first person to actually call him directly, as well as for my willingness to actually get his side of this whole thing.  He did, however, say that the thought the only reason I’m doing this is for link bait.  Which is NOT true.  And I informed him that when I write articles, I do so because I am passionate about our industry, and that passion leads to my writing on things I care about.

He also told me that while he was quite open to answering questions I presented, that it couldn’t be an unending list of questions – and I acknowledged the fact that I didn’t expect him to sit there on the phone with me for hours on end.

The Honey Buys More Than Venom Tactic

I need to mention up front that at one point toward the end of the conversation, Jeev mentioned my being a columnist at SearchEngineJournal.com and he invited me to write articles for the magazine they (Jeev and his cohorts) put out. You know – the one that happens to share part it’s name with that of the company they rank #1 in the SEO field…  I thanked him but declined.  go figure.

Why Complaints Matter.  And Don’t.

So on the one hand, there’s an ever increasing list of companies complaining about the TOPSEOs service.  Some have paid money to companies that TOPSEOs rates as highly rated, only to believe they’ve either been ripped off, or at the very least, that they’ve gotten far less in services than they were promised. Others have complained that though they’ve never paid, and nobody from TOPSEOs has ever spoken with them, that they were rated nonetheless.  And in those situations, some of them have reported that they then got a call from TOPSEOs offering to boost their ratings in direct relation to that company paying into the company’s monthly fee structure.

Still others have complained that TOPSEOs took their articles without permission, and the list of other complaints of varying types just keeps mounting.

99.8% Satisfaction

According to Jeev during our conversation, the reality is that they rate thousands of companies, so it’s reasonable that a few people would complain – you can’t satisfy everyone all the time.  At that point, there had only been perhaps five specific companies that had come forward online (that we’d been able to find or who joined the conversation at Sphinn). So Jeev was like – what’s 5 complaints compared to 3,000 companies in their system? That’s like a 99.8% success rating.

The Illusion Of Numbers

Truth be told – by itself, that concept – in its most simplistic form, is not unreasonable.  The fact is that in all my years in business, from time to time, I screw up just like everyone else does.  Occasionally, clients end up unhappy.  For a host of reasons.  So in that light, if that was the only issue, TOPSEOs would be considered an outstandingly good service provider.

Yo, Dude, It’s Not So Simple

It really isn’t so simple in this situation though.  Because we have to also look at the type of complaints, and the response mechanism in place to determine, in this court of public opinion, whether the “vast majority are happy” claim is true or not.  And how severe the complaints are. And how TOPSEOs responds.

The Toyota of the SEO World

Okay so this isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough.  If the complaints that come out against a company are of the “we’re not satisified, or “we didn’t get what we paid for” type, then the easy fix is to do what I do – to refund your client’s money.  And acknowledge that you’re far from perfect.  And to strive to do better next time.

But if the complaints are ones like Toyota recently faced – failed brakes, stuck gas pedals… well, those are much more serious in terms of how you need to go about addressing the complaints and what you’ll do to compensate for them, how you’ll take corrective action.  Because people die otherwise.

Now, I’m not saying that TOPSEOs is causing SEO industry people to die.  No, it’s not THAT serious.  What I am saying though is when we look at the complaints, – like stealing other peoples articles for your own gain, or claiming to allow site visitors to contact a company in the database even though that company has not paid to receive leads (and therefore that company will NOT receive those leads, but a company – a DIFFERENT COMPANY than the one the site visitor EXPECTS to contact, one that pays TOPSEOs for leads, will…

See – now we’re talking about some very serious complaints indeed.  Ones that you can’t rectify through reimbursement.  Because in both those cases, we’re talking about people who did not pay TOPSEOs in the first place and- in the case of stolen articles, TOPSEOs did NOT seek permission nor did they obtain it.

SCRAPED PROFILES – OR NOT

In at least one case, it was reported that a company had NOT paid to be listed, and that their listing was scraped, without permission or knowledge of that company.  It turned out, during my call with Jeev, that someone at that company had, in fact, a couple years back, submitted their company for a free listing.  I confirmed this with the person who made the original complaint.   Except Jeev told me that the person who had submitted the info originally had even contacted them afterward to have the profile updated.  That aspect of the rebuttal from Jeev is still being denied by my contact.  He says the profile info is at least 3 years old.

Either way – whether it’s been updated or not, in this one case it turned out that someone inside that company did, in fact, submit the information to TOPSEOs.

So that begs the question – of all the other companies claiming that nobody in their organization submitted their profile – that it was scraped without their knowledge – how many of those instances are like the one I investigated, and will turn out to be situations where one hand doesn’t report to the other what they’re doing?

I expect that at least some of the profiles in the system were scraped, because that’s how most directories get the beef of their content – they go out and gather information.  They don’t in fact, wait for companies to submit profiles, nor do they bother to contact those companies directly to ensure the information they are posting is 100% accurate.

But given that in at least one instance a person at the company did submit the profile, it’s a legitimate question that I ask of our industry.

SCRAPED ARTICLES

Clearly, in the case of those people claiming that TOPSEOs took their articles without permission, I tend to lean toward believing that to be a serious, legitimate complaint.  After all, if I wrote an article, I know damn well whether I gave someone else permission to use it or not.  And honestly, I’d love to see how Jeev counters this one.  We didn’t discuss it on our call so I can’t even begin to imagine how he’d dodge this bullet.

DECEPTIVE VISITOR SERVICES

Here’s one of the more serious charges – a visitor goes to TOPSEOs, scans the list of companies in the directory, clicks the link to contact that company, reasonably expects that someone from THAT company will contact them, and then gets pitched by another company.

I don’t care how you couch it, that is scum tactics.  Nowhere in the form process are you informed that you may not in fact be contacted by that company unless they pay a fee for leads, but that instead, you’ll be pitched by another company.  It’s not like the form says “Fill out this form to have an as yet undisclosed company pitch you on services”.  It specifically communicates that this is a form being sent to a specific company.  A company you, the visitor, took the time to select.

Heck, the moment you fill out the form, the confirmation even says you’ve contacted that company.  The one you THOUGHT you were contacting.

A Glimmer Of Hope In A Sea Of Bile

To Jeev’s credit, when I brought up that concern, he did tell me that “maybe I can improve that”.  He alluded to the possibility that disclosure could be improved in that contact form process.

But that was weeks ago.  And when I tried just now, nothing has changed.  There’s nothing obvious or clearly communicated, either on the profile page, or in the contact form process that states at all that you may or may not receive a contact back from the company we just told you that you contacted.

Why That’s Serious And Disgusting

It’s been said by others, but I’ll say it here.  In my own words.

Deceiving a site visitor into believing that they are submitting a contact form to a specific company and then diverting that contact form to another company is pure bullshit.

Jeev Has An Answer For Everything

Jeev’s rebuttal to my view on that tactic was cold, matter of fact, and pure “unethical business 101″.  He said – when that form gets filled out, we do send a notice to the email we have on record for that company.  We then invite them to join our leads program (the one for the hefty fee).  If they decline, it’s not our problem.  We then pass that lead along to another company.

WOAH JEEV – THANKS FOR NOTHING

This is simple business ethics.  Really people. It is.  If the recipient declines to participate, the ethical thing to do would be to inform the person who filled out the form that you could not, in fact, pass the lead along because that company chose not to participate in your leads program.

Better yet, you need to inform site visitors of how your system works in a clear, obvious and reasonable manner BEFORE they fill out the form or AS they’re filling out the form.  On that same form page.  Not buried in some disclaimer somewhere either.

And by failing to do that, your actions cause the person who filled out that form to consider the possibility that the company they tried to reach doesn’t care to even bother to respond to a simple contact form request.  Even though that’s not what happened.

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON HERE?
Jeev was quite clear with me in stating that they make it perfectly clear that TOPSEOs is a lead generating company, and that if you want to get those, you have to pay.  He also confirmed that their rating system and their SEO / PPC Competition are two distinctly separate services.  But he also confirmed to me that he thinks it’s quite reasonable to give only companies that pay a fee consistently high rankings in the general rankings system.  Jeev’s stance, as far as what he communicated during our phone call, is that they run a legitimate business offering legitimate and perfectly reasonable services.

My take on it is that Jeev and whoever else runs that company are of the “business ethics is a game” mentality.  If you do a whole bunch of scuzzy things, it doesn’t matter as long as you convince enough people that you offer a legitimate service.

And that’s where we cross into no-mans land….

Questionable Ethics In the SEO Industry

The SEO industry is just like any other in many ways.  One of those ways is that many business owners think that it’s either perfectly acceptable to buy awards, buy ratings, or buy a place in some phony “Who’s Who” book (SOOO 20th Century), or that it’s actually a legitimate business marketing tactic that helps you differentiate your company from the rest.  Even if they’re not truly unbiased, truly independent awards or ratings.

Some business owners are perfectly happy to pay their way to the “appearance” of being the best.  They just don’t care about consumer rights, or fair play, or anything else in that realm of life.  They’ll do whatever it takes, or almost anything this shy of their own ethical threshold, to get ahead. 

The truth is, it’s just marketing to them.  And at a societal level, it’s condoned across the board.

Fact – Fast Food will kill you.

Fact.  Smoking Cigarettes will kill you.

Fact.  Taking prescription medications based on a doctor’s best guess that they’re what may help you, may also kill you.

Fact.  The fine print that flashes on the bottom of the television screen for 3 seconds is so tiny and gone so fast, that no reasonable human being will ever be able to read them during that commercial.

But we don’t live in a society that truly cares enough about the consumer – we live in a society where those facts are discounted, laughed at, and otherwise spit upon by business owners, politicians, and the sheep society they’ve mastered.

So a company like TOPSEOs will, in all likelihood, continue to prosper.  Because so many companies will continue to pay for bullshit awards that aren’t otherwise worth the toilet paper they should be printed on.

CALLING ON TOPSEOS TO REFORM

Okay so lets pretend we live in an ideal world.   One where a serious bunch of legitimate complaints are filed against a company.  Complaints that point to flagrant abuse of industry companies and clearly stolen content.  In that ideal world, here’s what I think Jeev Trika needs to do.

1. Remove the Stolen Content

Delete every single article ever re-purposed that came from people or companies that did not provide clear, written permission to use those articles.  Not only is their use wrong, it’s a crime.

2. Clarify The Lead Re-Routing

Provide a disclaimer directly on the contact form on company profiles that unless the company in question has signed up for and paying for leads, that the form will be rerouted to another company of TOPSEOs choosing, and to offer the site visitor the option to opt out of having that form submitted if they don’t want another company to contact them.

3. Get Honest About Ratings

Provide a disclaimer directly on the top of every page that lists companies currently billed as “Best companies” in a given field that not all of the companies listed have, in fact, been thoroughly vetted as is claimed in the vetting process descriptions elsewhere on the site. 

4. Declare A Spade A Spade

Provide a disclaimer plainly visible in a substantive way on the site as appropriate, that informs visitors that only companies that pay a fee for a rating are going to end up with the highest “awards” and that “awards” are tied to money exchange.

5.  Stop The Spam

Clearly the volume of “press releases” sent out by, for or on behalf of TOPSEOs is at a volume directly proportional to the shear asshattery that this whole sham of an awards system is at.  Either stop sending them out altogether, or include the above mentioned disclaimers directly in every press release.

6.  Respond To Complaints Maturely

When so many perfectly legitimate companies complain and get no positive resolution, it’s disgusting.  There should be a clearly explained mechanism for complaint handling and every company that has lodged a complaint in this discussion to this point should be contacted by a TOPSEOs manager with the promise to resolve this issue to the complaintant’s satisfaction (within reason).  And then that needs to be carried out.

7.  Remove every single reference to the word “independent”

Look – billing your company as “independent” gives the appearance of being unbiased, and that you really do rate all companies fairly, not based on financial compensation.  If you don’t make it crystal clear that this is a paid rating service, at least you can have the decency to not claim independent status.  Because you’re not independent.  You’re bought and paid for.

I am sure there are plenty more desired goals that will come from our industry peers, however personally, I think if Jeev steps up to the plate and does these, I’d be quite surprised, and would be happy to write a new article detailing those actions, and show that TOPSEOs really does care about ethical business practices.

What do you think?

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UPDATE 4/27/2010

As I was perusing the TOPSEOs site just now, I came across their complaint form.  The one where you get to register a complaint against a member.  So of course, I took the time to fill it out, given that I have a legitimate complaint.

It read:

See my latest article detailing the litany of complaints that now add up to a clear situation of deceptive practices, questionable yet clearly unethical business methods, and outright theft of other people’s intellectual property.  Would love for Jeev to dispute these in a public format or in writing.  Otherwise we will have no choice but to contact every company in your public database and challenge them to stay with you or bail.

Have a nice day.

I hope they’ll make an appropriate response and chastise themselves because after the form was completed, I got a little popup saying how seriously they take complaints.4

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FOLLOW-UP TO THIS MORNING’S UPDATE

I got an email response back from TOPSEO’s regarding my submission of their complaint form – where I complained to them about them 

Alan,

The form you filled out is focused on trying to resolve issues with those who have purchased internet marketing services and tools and with those who provide such services.  Your complaint doesn’t meet that criteria.

Thank you.

THANK YOU?  You thanked me for not using the form as it was intended?  And that’s all?  < sigh >  I guess they only care about complaints against their members, not against their own company.  How unexpected.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. TOPSEOs Deceptive Practices – An Interview with Jeev Trika is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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And so, in honor of the roller coaster of emotion we in the SEO industry face on a daily basis, I came up with this little bar chart that shows the eight emotional stages of an SEO consultant during the contract process.  Of course, this same emotional process can easily be adapted by most any industry that involves professional services.  But I don’t work in just any industry.  So if you want to adapt this to your own industry, feel free to do so.  Just be sure to send me a licensing fee of $75,000.00 each time you do.

Update:

someone asked why I marked “annoyed” for my “After I vent on Twitter” column. “Shouldn’t that be “relieved” or “justified”? they asked?  Well I suppose, sometimes.  But mostly when I am rambling on in a multi-tweet Twitter rant, I’m still so steamed over whatever it is that got me riled up that at best it just calms me down to the “annoyed” level.  Of course your ranting mileage may vary.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Eight Emotional Stages of an SEO Contract is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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