Marketingeasy Internet Marketing Explained » black hat

False Reviews? It can cost you more than SEO damages.

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:48:07 +0000

I found this clinic on Google Maps Reviews!

Since my last post about business and google Maps, I received some emails asking around the risks of self-review.

Besides the possible brand damage and SEO problems, You now can incur in legal problems.

That’s what happened to a Plastic Surgery Company in New York.

False reviews cost the company a wooping $300,000 in an agreement that portends significant change in local search marketing.

New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo secured a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company that “flooded the internet with false positive reviews”. A press release claims that this is believed to be the first case in the nation against “astroturfing” on the Internet.

From the release:

Lifestyle Lift employees published positive reviews and comments about the company to trick Web-browsing consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories. These tactics constitute deceptive commercial practices, false advertising, and fraudulent and illegal conduct under New York and federal consumer protection law. The settlement marks a strike against the growing practice of “astroturfing,” in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.”

“This company’s attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative, and illegal,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the Internet.”

So there you go, on your own risk.

Lucio Ribeiro

Little know way to get back issues of online publications

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:22:04 +0000

Google is cool.

Google serves as a handy searchable archive for back issues of online publications.

Internet is moving quick. However one thing is still moving slower – Internet search, keep reading….

Not all sites have their own search engines technology, and even the ones that do are sometimes difficult to use, usually they are powered by Search Engines tech.

Complicated or incomplete search engines are more pain than gain when attempting to search through archives of published articles.

If you follow a couple of rules, Google is handy for finding back issues of published resources.

The trick is to use a common phrase to find the information you’re looking for. Let’s use the New York Times as an example.

Articles from the NYT

Your first intuition when searching for previously published articles from NYTimes.com might be to simply use site:nytimes.com in your Google query.

For example, if I wanted to find articles on George Bush, why not use:

“george bush” site:nytimes.com

This will indeed find you all articles mentioning George Bush published on NYTimes.com.

What it won’t find is all the articles produced by the New York Times but republished elsewhere.

While doing research, keep credibility firmly in mind. If you’re doing casual research, maybe you don’t need to double-check a story to make sure it actually comes from the New York Times, but if you’re researching a term paper, double-check the veracity of every article you find that isn’t actually on the New York Times site.

What you actually want is a clear identifier, no matter the site of origin, that an article comes from the New York Times. Copyright disclaimers are perfect for the job. A New York Times copyright notice typically reads:

Of course, this would only find articles from 2001.

A simple workaround is to replace the year with a Google full-word wildcard :

Let’s try that George Bush search again, this time using the snippet of copyright disclaimer instead of the site: restriction:

“Copyright * The New York Times Company” “George Bush”

At this writing, you get over three times as many results for this search as for the earlier attempt.

Magazine Articles

For example, Scientific American’s typical copyright disclaimer looks like this:

Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
(The date appears before the disclaimer, so I just dropped it to avoid having to bother with wildcards.)

Using that disclaimer as a quote-delimited phrase along with a search word—hologram, for example—yields the Google query:

hologram “Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.”
At this writing, you’ll get one result, which seems like a small number for a general query like hologram.

When you get fewer results than you’d expect, fall back on using the site: syntax to go back to the originating site itself.

hologram site:sciam.com

In this example, you’ll find several results that you can grab from Google’s cache but are no longer available on the Scientific American site.

Most publications that I’ve come across have some kind of common text string that you can use when searching Google for its archives.

Usually it’s a copyright disclaimer and most often it’s at the bottom of a page.

Use Google to search for that string and whatever query words you’re interested in, and if that doesn’t work, fall back on searching for the query string and domain name.

I personally have a string reason to use this google hack. Do you see value for you?

Let me know

Lucio Ribeiro

marketingeasy.net

Another Black Hat SEO Scam

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:55:07 +0000

Another day I wrote about a sneak seo scam. Today I’m covering another SEO anti-linking tactic used for BlackHat(ers).

When you decide Optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO) the most logic step you need to take is to Analyze your competition; then you can find tendency to links for your area/segment.

The one I like to use is Link Diadnosis, it gives you Link per Domain, and you can sort by

link type;
link anchor text;
PageRank;
page internal+external links.

making your life much easier.

After running some reports you can have all the important information about your competitor’s links.

Then you can decide to to the right thing or to do the wrong thing.

The right inbound link strategy would be to contact potential linkers and develop any kind of relationship with them (offer to write a guest post, comment, etc) or,

you can decide the wrong thing….

It works like this:

You email a “Cease and Desist” letter to the webmasters linking to your competitor website, asking them to remove the outbound links to YOUR competitor’s website.

You present yourself as the “owner” of your competitor’s brand, asking them to remove the link.

This is how the email looks like:

_______________

Dear Sir/Madam

I am contacting you on behalf of www.Insurance.com, located in Sydney, Australia. We manage Insurance.com’s Internet monitoring function for brand identity issues on the Internet.

We’d like to discuss the use of the trademarked name of Insurance.com or one of its subsidiaries on your website.

As owner of the name, Insurance.com (and/or its subsidiaries) owns the exclusive right to reproduce and use its trademarks and authorize any reproduction and use. Insurance.com does not recognize the use of its name in the above-referenced site as authorized. Therefore, your use of this trademark is a violation of its rights.

Insurance.com demands that you cease and desist from using its name in any manner and that you remove all use of its trademark from the referenced website.

Please address these issues immediately. Please contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,

Trademark Administration
Insurance.com

—————–

I can think of many websites removing links trying to avoid legal problem. I can imagine the guy from IT panicking together with the Legal department.

I should agree is indeed a clever scheme but stupid strategy.

Cheers

Lucio Dias Ribeiro