SEO Scam

SEO Scam - Another scam from iGetNet in California
This is one of the biggest Internet scams in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) today. Millions of dollars are being scammed by high pressure telesales groups from iGetNet. iGetNet calls this "Search Engine Positioning" (SEP). Here's how it works. A iGetNet representative or one of its affiliated groups calls a small business offering them the "opportunity" to be listed in the top rankings in Yahoo and other search engines. This representative then suggests that they help the customer "choose an effective search keword or keywords". Here's the catch. They suggest a worthless word that will never get clicked!! They then go to Overture and purchase this word on a "Pay-per-click" (PPC) basis. Overture purchases the top 3 spots in Yahoo and other engines and thus if you type in the keyword that iGetNet just sold you, such as "blue dog food", or something equally worthless, the customer's keyword shows up as a top listing. But who would ever type this keyword in a search engine, none-the-less click it?
iGetNet then charges the customer monthly for this word, but nothing ever happens. Eventually the customer's catch on. However, before this happens, iGetNet representatives are quick to follow up a few days after the call and show the customer that they're "First in Yahoo" and try an up sell. ..... More money lost. Kiss your money good bye! Call Craig Holland, iGetNet CEO at 866.738.0898.
You should notify your Attorney General this fraud in your state immediately.

Since they DO give you a top search engine position, you can't call it a fraud.

Not getting multiple quotes from companies or others suggested words is your first sign of scamming yourself. A company that is ethical will always take the time to consult you. This practice is followed by all good ethical seo's, why not take the time up front, get it right and have the most success out of the sale. Its about client retention not rejection.

Take the time to investigate what you are getting into, remeber a business wants you as a client.. why not make them work for it?

This sounds about right, I get about 3 to 4 calls a week from different companies offering to help me be number one. Usually at a cost of $2000 a keyword.

As a funny, a while back, I was contacted and offered the chance to get my kw's into the top 10. I told her that it might be very difficult because some of the terms were quite competitive. She told me: "No problem, what are they?". I gave her the terms for her to check and get back to me. She never called back. I had given her 4-5 terms where we were #1.

I work on a site that received a call with a similar proposition. The company was called Net Solutions. They said they are an authorized Yahoo affiliate. The offer is for $99/month, first month is free with no contract. Sounded scammy to me, but when I spoke to them, there was no pressure and I was told the site was chosen for its niche appeal, placement would be on a first come first basis. Currently, the site design even has an "under construction" icon and no real layout or purpose. Has anyone had contact with them?

I decided to try out the 30-day free trial for Net Solutions, also hyped as Yahoo Top Placement. Near as I can tell, it is a scam, or at least it seems alot like one. They told me it would take a few weeks to get up and running, but they never told me it had started. Before the end of the month I replyed to their email stating "Please discontinue this service." They still managed to bill me twice under the name IGetTheNet.com before I got them to stop. I am now trying to get my money back, but not sure if I will be able to. I think it is just a couple of guys from California running a scam. But I would be interested in hearing from anyone it really worked for. Can't seem to find evidence of that anywhere.

YOU are probably part of the mafia-like family of crooks who run this company sipping your drink on the beach somewhere on other honest people's money - trying to justify this pack of thieves' multi-million dollar CON - under these 24/7 internet crooks:
Todd Johnson, President - STAY AWAY FROM THEM ALL! Craig Holland, CEO - STAY AWAY! Carl Perkins, CIO - STAY AWAY!
(Your mentality obviously is warped: like, hey - get a tire for your auto you need to be safe to support your driving on the road - oh,
you received a tire that was glued together? you mean it fell apart and you were in an auto accident and mamed for life? gee, well
they did sell you a 'tire' afterall - you really shouldn't call it fraud!) GET REAL! YOU MUST BE ONE OF THEM responding as if there is
any spark of logic in your statement: FRAUD IS FRAUD! BEING SOLD SOMETHING THEY KNEW WAS WORTHLESS AND MISREPRESENTING IT INTENTIONALLY IS FRAUD - CRIMINAL FRAUD - But then again - denial is big among crooks! go ahead and justify your distorted logic to a judge in criminal court - wanna try it bud?

Hmmm - jumping to conclusions are we. The shouting doesn't help either to get a point across

I take it you were the vicitm of some kind of SEO scam?

As I said before I will rank any term for 17 dollars a hour and a cup of hot chocolate for every hour overtime served.

If you let me wear my bunny slippers while I work I will take off 2 dollars a hour.

consumers should do their homework too.
my competitor has always been doing these high pressure and worthless ranking words all the time.
well, both consumer and seo company agreed on those words. what can I say?
lmao.

did you guys sign any contract with them cooltech2010 ? If all they promised was a #1 ranking, then you are probably out of your money.

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I don't know why this topic is posted under SEO, it has nothing to do with SEO, but anyway...

I worked for Nett Solutions (yes it's NETT with 2 T's), a division of iGenuity, and tied somehow to IGetNet) for all of 8 days before I was fired for showing up 5 minutes late most days and for not making lots of calls but rather trying to do more research prior to making those calls. Both valid points I suppose, although I have more to say about that later...

The company said they had an agreement with Overture in which they could resell keywords at a flat rate for top Yahoo placement, meaning 1st position with possible occasional dips into second position, in the top sponsored box. 11 other search engines being fed by Overture were also going to place that site at least on their first page if not in the top spots.

This company seemed to be legit from what I could observe. There were some people working the phones who had been there over a year and I saw no signs of the customers not getting what they were promised, or not getting their service stopped if they didn't like the number or quality of clicks.

Sure, they'd get a call from their rep to see what the problem was and if it was fixable or if some other terms might be worth looking into, but it was not a hard sell before they let the people cancel, and it didn't seem to me to be many people that were unhappy. They offered a 12 month guarantee on the term pricing while only making it a month-to-month commitment, so clearly they were being fair in that regard.

They did try and steer the search terms into the more specific ones which kept the cost down while also theoretically focusing in more on the particular site's offerings, so I'm not so sure that was a bad thing, except perhaps in the use of the sub-25 search terms which could perhaps be a pig in a poke. After all, sub 25 could mean zero, who knows? Yet they were billed for 24 and since they tended to be 10 cent'ers, they then rounded up to the nearest $25 which meant that if you took out a few sub-25 terms, you could be paying $100 or more per month for no clicks or maybe a few clicks.

As far as offering a legit product, the fact is, either the client's site was on top or it wasn't. If they were on top, the company fulfilled it's promise, and anyone doing a search on any computer in the world could check that out at any time. So I can't possibly see how what this company did as a "scam". They simply offered an alternative to SEO or PPC. If the customer signs off on worthless terms, then, well "shame on him or her" right? They can look up the searches and bid prices just like anyone else.

On the other hand they did use very high pressure tactics to try and "gloss over" the individual merits of each keyword phrase. When calling back the potential client after having run it by "research" I was supposed to act real happy that I had found them such gems, and then explain to them in only general terms what the keywords were, not really spelling each one out specifically or emailing or faxing them the list of keyworks at this point. My job was then to get them to give me a credit card # to "secure a temporary hold" on those keywords, or something to that effect. There was no credit card fraud going on, the company would not process the charge until we faxed the agreement to them with their CC # typed in and then the client faxed back
the signed agreement. But the point was, the only time that the client had to actually look in detail at the keyword list was in that hour or so that the rep would give them under high pressure to sign and return the faxed agreement, and the terms would be listed as a group with a group price, rather than spelling out the cost and search traffic for each term. I personally would never do busines that way, I would, as a consumer, demand more specific information. But all I can say is that the client is ultimately falling for that high pressure tactic and if he/she hasn't done the research before signing off on those terms for that price, well, what can you say? It's kind of a sleazy way of doing business but it's not illegal.

Having said that, I'll say that I personally wasn't very comfortable with the way they did business and some of that may well have showed stongly enough in my questions, comments and actions to have been the real reason I was fired, I don't know. Here for what they are worth were my hesitations:

They got their leads primarily from email spam and from voice mail blasts (spam). The voice mail blast was using a fake name which they changed every so often.

My job was to call these people starting out with "Hi I'm from (fake person's name) (currently "Scott Williams" and previously "Lisa Meyers") office getting back to you...". One realtor got mad at me saying that this (fake) person had called saying he was interested in purchasing some property, and when this agent called back, he was given to me as a lead interested in top Yahoo placement. I asked my boss about this accusation of trickery and the boss simply laughed it off and said the agent must have been mistaken, he must have gotten the names mixed up with someone else.

The email and voice mail spams (except for the real estate directed ones?) were supposedly of the order "we really feel you have a great site worthy of top Yahoo placement and would like to discuss the possibilities with you". The fact is that at that point nobody had even looked at the person's site or for that matter, even knew if they had a site. It got to be funny to hear some of the sales calls "Do you even have a website? Well, sorry, we can't give you top website placement if you don't have a website". Or I'd get a site that couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes to create in a free site builder program and which didn't even have any relevant search terms in it.

It seems odd to me that we (Nett Solutions) had no website in which to point our customers to in order to try and build trust, although they say they are currently working on a new one that will go up in a month. The iGenuity site is nothing more than a hollow shell, so that didn't help much.

On the positive side, the company did in fact qualify sites for appropriate keywords and phrases prior to submitting the order to Yahoo for approval, so even if there was some pre-sale trickery or bait-and-switch or insincerity going on, in the end every sale was a legitimate one from what I could tell.

Did the end justify the means? I'm not comfortable with it and consider it unethical, but I'm not going to pass judgement on the other reps for going along with it. That was just the style that particular business chose to use, and if the reps wanted to keep their job they had to do it that way.

The other part that really bothered me was, if this was in many cases a better alternative to SEO or PPC efforts, why not just lay out the facts and give the customer some credit for being able to make an informed decision without all the hype and pressure? What would be wrong with simply actually DOING a bit of prior research and coming across great sites spending lots of money on PPC or SEO and offering them the opportunity to grab terms at:

(last months search volume) x (current max bid price) x .33

That was essentially the formula this company used but we had to pretend we had no idea how things would price out until we ran it by "research". They would, however, take a low priced term and round it up to the next $25 increment, for whatever reason, then in most cases would give somewhat of a discount from the resulting price. It was pretty sad to see a $3 or $5 term get rounded up to $25, especially if there were a batch of them.

They then added on a one-time setup fee which tended to be from $100 to $200, depending on the number of terms. That was understandable considering that covered the writing of the marquee and specifying the best landing page for each term.

(The $99/mo for 4 phrases with no setup fee and 1st mo free offer was long gone by the time I got there.)

In fact, why, if Yahoo has this great choice available, would they stoop to farming out the product to boiler rooms in the first place? Why not just offer the product directly on their site and keep the commissions for themselves? For example, it would seem to be quite a logical and cost effective idea to simply to either offer the flat fee program on their site or email all their PPC clients to say, "Hey, you are spending $500 a month on average for these 10 search terms. How about signing at least some of them up for permanent flat fee placement so you can avoid the never-ending bidding wars, click fraud, and constant attention required to keeping your site on top?" It seems to me that if the price was right they'd get tons of almost effortless sales without requiring a commissioned sales force to do it.

It's for that reason that I do question whether this company really does have an agreement with Yahoo for flat fee guaranteed placement or if they just tell their employees and therefore their customers that. Maybe they actually accomplish it through some kind of software that automatically keeps the client on top through PPC bidding, or something like that. I guess it doesn't matter as long as the client gets the same result either way.

The way I see it, bottom line, is that if someone is better off "locking in" a term for a flat fee then it's a good business decision. I'd think that the terms, if any, that would be good candidates for such a program would be ones in which:

1) the bid price has been or threatens to be ramping up quickly due to competition,

2) which is narrowly focused enough in order to provide your site with something at least reasonably close to a 33% click through if you are on the top, (or if you have a much lower click-through but consider the premium price to be a worthwhile "insurance" against future increases in click price or in your click-through rate),

3) which is in your ad budget,

4) is a term that you'd hate to lose to your competition on a flat rate, and

5) is not so cheap that you get severely "rounded up" to the next $25.

I might try and find another company that offers this service in a more honest way, more along the lines of how I laid it out above. Otherwise I don't think I have the stomach for this type of selling. Honesty has always been my Achilles Heel.

Someone please give me some feedback on this. Do you think that the idea of simply spelling out the formula and the program to customers would result in sales or is it a bad deal which needs to be cloaked in secrecy, half-truths and high-pressure sales tactics in order to be sold?

Larry

I was approached by a representative "Ron" from (Nett Solutions). I spoke to Ron who pretended as though I asked or "applied for information". If I requested info, I do not remember it- and in his defense I suppose it's possible but not probable I requested some information. It seemed like a tactic I used to use to cold call..anyway.- I tried 2 searches to find the company. The first search :"nettsolutions" turned up nothing on the company. The second search "nett solutions" pulled up this blog:

SEO Scam - SEO ChatI decided to try out the 30-day free trial for Net Solutions, ... I worked for Nett Solutions (yes it's NETT with 2 T's), a division of iGenuity, ...
forums.seochat.com/seo-professionals-57/seo-scam-10917.html - 121k -


My initial hesitation is that a company that makes its business to help other companies get found on the web should have a better handle on their own keywords and variations. I work for a small company and have had variations and campaigns that total more than 2000 searchable terms, and as many as 200 custom ad variations.

I am always open to new methods for increasing site traffic but I get spammed everyday by companies that say they can achieve results. I get calls from seemingly nice guys like Ron and I end up trying to save others time on such ventures.

There is no substitute for old fashioned hard work- and gimmicks never pay off. Good luck and please ad to this if you legitimately know more than I.

Nate

thanks to all for writing in about this. My boss was spammed from this company but asked me to look into it, so I actually spoke to a woman who works at Nett solutions. She was very nice and I just had to hear her schtick. I said I would think about it and have now rec'd 3 follow up calls from her within 10 days. I have no intention of getting back to her. It sounded like a scam and is a scam so I just had to give my 2 cents. It sounded too good to be true and it is.