SEO UPDATES

… unless you have the legal budget to back it up.

Google Blogoscoped reported how SEO Inc. dropped out of Google’s rankings for virtually every SEO-related term, including their company name.

SEO Inc. fired back with a cease & desist notice.

Some people / companies will never learn.

After sending the cease & desist, Boing Boing eventually picked up the story.

A tiny little weblog post on a not-so-widely-read blog suddenly gets BoingBoing’d after getting the lawyers involved, and probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers now have a negative impression of SEO Inc.

Duncan Riley outs a comment spammer (Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com) over on blog herald:

Duncan Riley> Whilst digging for my last post I also discovered an SEO who is not only using comment spam on blogs as a tool, but is actually soliciting for new comment spamming scripts using Freelancing sites.

(Drum roll please) And the SEO is: Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com.

Now its one thing to be unscrupulous enough to spam blogs in the pursuit of search engine traffic, but it takes a particular level of stupidity to advertise for someone to write you a new script as Amy has done at Get A Freelancer.com.

If you follow the link you’ll also disturbingly find that there are quite a few offers from programmers willing to help her in her comment spamming ways.

So who is Amy Cross, if that is indeed her or his real name? Well the whois information provides little use, with the contact details being held from public view. On her site she describes her self as follows: “Amy has been recognized as an effective leader who is in tune with her client needs and has one of the single highest customer satisfaction and consumer confidence ratings ever recorded”. For somebody so well known I cant even find her on Google.

We do know however that the site is hosted on marketrends.net, a Sacramento based hosting company. So if we don’t know who Amy is, we do know a little about one of her customers, who provides a customer reference to Amy right on the front page, and guess what products they are flogging…..if you guessed cialis you’d be right! So Joe Hopkins of genbucks.com, come on down! But you know, for some strange reason these comment spammers don’t want to be found because Joe also uses a cloaking company for his domain registration, and even the dns for his host is cloaked.

So a dead end for now, but none the less the world is hopefully a slightly better place for the exposure of this comment spamming scum. Have a nice weekend!

Amy Cross - you’re busted!

How would you like to plead to the court of public opinion?

A service that can be used to help limit the fraud that seems to be growing in the Pay-Per-Click world.

New Service Helps Stop Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud

PPC Trax released to the general public to help track and stop PPC click fraud, improve PPC advertisers’ conversion rates and improve PPC Return-On-Investment (ROI).

[ClickPress, Mon Feb 21 2005] Chandler, AZ - February 21, 2005 - PPC Trax has announced the beta release of it’s highly anticipated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tracking and auditing service at http://www.ppctrax.com/ .

With the billion dollar PPC industry still growing at 20% per year, new advertisers come into the market daily. New and long-time PPC advertisers with ad spend budgets from $200 to thousands
per day are being systematically defrauded of their marketing budgets.

Both groups of marketers and advertisers are clamoring for a solution to help prevent affiliates, publishers and competitors from stealing their ad budgets in the growing scheme.

PPC Trax is a monthly service that offers detailed click fraud tracking and reporting starting as low as $29.00 per month.

For a limited time, PPC Trax is offering free 30 day trial accounts to PPC advertisers.

“Clients and colleagues have been begging us to develop a simple to use but highly effective PPC tracking solution that can help detect and stop PPC click fraud as well as serve as the basis for
recovering refunds from pay-per-click search engines and media properties”, said Skip Pratt, General
Manager of PPC Trax.

“We decided to invest the capital and manpower realizing this gap in the market exists and there is a pent-up demand from marketers to make more effective use of their advertising budgets and to
cease fraud from occurring to them” Pratt continued.

Since the vendors who offer pay-per-click advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud, advertisers are now turning to third party click auditors such as PPC Trax.

PPC marketers and advertisers benefit from using the PPC Trax service by:

- Improving website lead generation and PPC sales conversion rates
- Maximizing profitable PPC ads faster
- Eliminating costly, non-performing PPC advertising
- Developing the perfect advertising mix for their website
- Identifying the most profitable keywords for their PPC campaign
- Eliminating failed PPC ads faster
- Detecting and document PPC click fraud
- Recoup fraudulent PC expenses from PPC search engines
- Identifying PPC competitors who may be draining their PPC budget
- Identifying IP addresses that are frequent clickers or fraudsters
- Monitoring click spikes that indicate fraudsters are on the march

The service offers each subscriber, whether small home-based businesses or large corporations:

- Track any filetype - .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .cfm, .cgi, .pl,
- Generous transactions per URL
- Transactions can be aggregated among URL’s
- IP address capture
- IP address geographic location
- User Agent (browser, bot etc.)
- Date and Time stamp
- Referring URL
- Email alerts
- IP address history
- Custom reports

In addition, PPC Trax is offering “recovery based” click fraud services using it’s online and staff services. PPC Trax shoulders the risk of refunds from the PPC search engine and performs all the labor to prepare and submit refund requests. This service has certain requirements. Contact the company at the website below for more information.

PPC Trax is offering a limited-time, free 30 day PPC click fraud tracking account. The free trial offer is a full function account. There are no further commitments required.

To improve your PPC sales conversion ratios and improve PPC return-on-investment, visit www.ppctrax.com

About PPC Trax
PPC Trax provides real-time click fraud and web advertising tracking, auditing and recovery services for it’s small, medium and large corporate clients. For more information, see the company website at:
www.ppctrax.com

The following was posted on 3/22/05 to this thread:

Good Day All,

We are a marketing firm specializing in Online Gaming & Poker and are looking to hire a Senior(if possible) Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Specialist/Manager.

We would prefer to have a local candidate, or someone who comes from Ontario or Canada, but relocation is an option if absolutely necessary.

Rusty, Danny, and other Moderators, any ideas on how and where I can find Toronto based SEO’s looking for work?

If anyone is interested - Please PM me..

Cheers

Critter