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Jill
I wonder if they can use that same technology to create an iPhone app that allows you to do voice recognition dialing. There are a few apps like that, but I've heard they're not very good right now.
It's great to see Washington State cracking down on this sort of thing. Weren't they the ones that cracked down on that other company recently that had a zillion complaints?
I hope other states follow suit so we can rid the world of incompetent SEO companies.
But Joe, what if those things that appear to be unactionable are written into the contract they provide their customers? Then do they become actionable? (Prolly should post at SEOmoz and ask Ms. Bird.)
Of course we don't know what is in their contracts or if they even use one.
There are a lot of things we don't know. They can't be all bad though, they helped you Jill.
Aha! Didn't see the connection before, thanks for pointing that out.
I have no idea if the company is bad or not. Don't know anything about them. But I doubt that a state's attorney general files these sorts of claims lightly. It sounded like there were numerous complaints filed against the company, which is what prompted things.
I think it's great that the state is further investigating the claims. It can be frustrating to file complaints and never see any action take place (kinda like filing a spam report with Google!).
I will be interested to see the outcome, but more interested to see how these cases affect how the rest of us conduct business, write copy for our sites and constuct our client documentation. I have a feeling there will be much more of a need to cross t's and dot i's across the board. I blame the original company that caused the crackdown (not to condone any other who may be doing the same).
I hope that is the outcome! If this is a good wake up call for SEO companies who are offering services not quite up to par or who are not working with decent contracts, then that would be great.
Any SEO company that has shoddy business practices give us all a bad name. Any company that has to worry about the AG's office and what they might find if they looked into their business practices shouldn't be in business, imo.
The rest of us have nothing to hide.
See also this sphinn: http://sphinn.com/story/85079 and the commentary by SEOmoz's attorney, Sarah Bird.
Very true, Joe. However, it appears there are some fundamental consumer rights issues that are at the heart of the case, i.e., companies not getting what they paid for, and/or not being able to cancel their service without continuing to get charged.
Without knowing all the details, it sounds as if Washington is alleging that the company in question isn't fullfilling their end of their contract. In which case, it wouldn't really be a tech kind of case but a typical contract case, no?
I doubt one complaint from SEOmoz would cause the attorney general to up and take notice. Don't think ole Rand has that kind of power (yet!).
His opinion (the original post) was invalidated because he totally personally attacked the live bloggers.
While I think the resulting discussion that occurred here at sphinn was helpful, the original blog post was just mean and nasty and not at all helpful.
I've never liked live blogging either from the perspective of being the speaker that gets live blogged.
However, the guy that wrote this post is a total ass. Nuff said.
I just have to add that AnnieCushing is my new hero. (Not sure how I haven't noticed her before.)
No need for anyone to read anything other than what she's written here, as she has it exactly right!
No need to be humbled, Annie. You totally rocked this thread. Thanks for your cool head and great comments.
Nice to see Chris getting the recognition she deserves. She's definitely more one to recognize others than to be in the spotlight herself.
This just goes to show you that there really aren't any white hat SEO secrets. (Which is why I didn't want to be on that panel...I have nothing to give up either.)
This may also speak to the same thing Rand pointed out recently with the "seo company" SERP a few weeks ago, i.e., low quality links do indeed seem to still work in Google.
This is often a tricky (but common) problem.
Sometimes the client (especially very large companies) simply can't make the recommended changes as the people you're dealing with are not actually authorized to change things on the website.
Sometimes, the client really doesn't agree with the changes, however. Perhaps they never realized you were going to actually CHANGE VISIBLE STUFF ON THEIR WEBSITE! :O It's amazing how many companies still think you're just going to change meta tags!
While I'm sure this author explained exactly the types of things they may be doing, it is often a problem of not having everything spelled out completely beforehand. One of the first questions we ask clients is if they understand that their website will most definitely be changing, both the words on it and perhaps even some design elements. This weeds out most of the ones that never quite understand that.
This article misses the mark, imo, because the best link builders are indeed the most creative.
CC pulled bait and switch on me many years ago and I've refused to shop there ever since. Good riddance, imo.
Lighten up, guys. While the Title was somewhat sensationalistic, Brian wasn't saying to spam facebook. He just said to hook up your tweets with your facebook statuses, which is indeed a good idea for most people.
Sugarrae wrote:
They asked me if they should update their Twitter status all day for no reason so they could stay at the top of the Facebook status updates their friends see. They got that idea from the title. They thought this must be a great tactic since it was on the homepage of Sphinn.
Maybe they should have read the whole article?
And Brian's next post will be "How to dominate Sphinn comments via a controversial Headline"!
This post is totally dominating the sphinn comments at the moment.
I recently friended my daughter's boyfriend and he commented to her, "Man, your mom update's her FB status like every hour!"
(Not sure if that makes me cool, a geek, or something else in his eyes though!)
Story: Google Launches Voice Recognition Search for Apple iPhone