Creeper SEO

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Washougal, WA – NeTraffic Managment’s Total Search Engine Presence Package is an all inclusive web marketing platform, from which your company will launch it’s search engine optimization, search engine placement and search engine marketing campaigns.

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Each year the Google Zeitgeist lists and the Zeitgeist USA lists in particular are poured over with interest as people in the search marketing business try to glean gems of information from the year’s search patterns. As well as this data there are lists that are just plain old interesting.

This year one of the things that caught our eye was the figures from the Google Translation tools. Below is a list of the fastest rising translated words.

1. you
2. what
3. thank you
4. please
5. love

Showing that no matter how global communications become there is always time for good manners!

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TinEye fan Jeff left us a quick note to let us know that he spied TinEye in action over on Digg.  The post in question - Awesome Spaghetti Junction, what city is this? - included the image below and the simple question:

What city is this?

How can you find out more about an image such as this one when the image is all you have? Simple. Use TinEye.com. TinEye is the only search engine able to find your exact image in over a billion images crawled from the web.

Digg user ka9dgx used TinEye to find the image in a National Geographic Traveler story about Bangkok, Thailand.   TinEye also located the originalimage titled “The Veins of Bangkok” on Flickr, just one of the 26 different instances of this image found on the web.

And who took this shot? Trey Ratcliff, a part-time photographer that I first learned about back in August when I wrote this post about Copyright and Creative Commons.  You can see more of Trey’s amazing images by visiting his blog Stuck in Customs.

Click the image below to try the TinEye search yourself and discovery where else Trey’s image has travelled online.  Still need to get your TinEye account?Grab one here.

Image: Trey Ratcliff

May It Please the Mozzers,

The Washington State Attorney General announced in a press release yesterday that it was suing a Redmond-based SEO company, Visible.net. According to the Complaint, Visible also does business under the name WebMarketingSource.com, Caputures.com, and Captures.com (that’s not a typo). The AG also names the owner of the companies, Gilbert Walker, as a defendant in the case.

The defendants sell website design, SEO, and other internet marketing services, along with providing e-conmmerce services to process online purchases for merchant customers. They promote their services through their website and by telemarketing. Packages include an intial startup fee of 3,749.99 up to $9,749.99 plus a monthly fee of $39.9 to $99.99.

“When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull rank,” Attorney General Rob McKenna said. “Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.” The Ag’s Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, said that AG’s office and the Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005.

Washington filed the lawsuit on behalf of consumers and accuses the companies and their owner of violating state consumer protection and telemarketing laws. The complaint makes the following claims:

• Defendants misrepresented their ability to increase their customers’ traffic, ranking, and sales. Defendants misrepresented that their customers will obtain increased sales by using defendants’ services, for example stating that they will have “more business than they can handle,” that they will be making money within “60 to 90 days,” and that they will have a “hard time keeping up with Internet orders.”
• Defendants also misrepresented that they are affiliated with other marketers in order to sell services to prospective clients. For example, they falsely represented that they are affiliated with Specialty Merchandise Company, a drop-ship. SMC is a “membership program” whereby member/resellers pay a monthly fee for the right to advertise and sell products that SMC directly ships to their members’ customers. The defendants directly solicited these members, claiming that they were affiliated with the company. A number of consumers agreed to p[urchase defendants’ services in the mistaken belief that they are, in fact, affiliated with SMC.
• The defendants are also accused of wrongfully claiming that its customer services representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.
• Defendants allegedly failed to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests. They continued to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitted alleged debts to collection agencies.
• The defendants also failed to register with the Washington Department of Licensing as commercial telephone solicitors and failed to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.

The AG is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices.

Visible.net has not yet issued at statement about the lawsuit, but a representative said that they will probably post something on their blog. UPDATE: Visible.net posted a response on its blog. They deny the AG’s allegations.

I’ll keep you updated as the case develops.

Best Regards,
Sarah L. Bird

Hat tip to Ryan Todd for bringing the case to my attention.

Other coverage:

Networkworld.com

Source: SEOmoz