What’s up with this marketing blurb?
We get your web site submitted for listing on the top 400 search engines!
i wonder who the target is there. Which would you rather have, submission to the top 400 search engines (or top 40,000,000 search engines, for that matter) or precise expert technical advice on how to get your site a solid, consistent ranking in the top five search engines? Or even only the top three?
Here is a news flash– the top however-many search providers use the same few search engines provided by a handful of search engine providers. So the things you do to maximize your page rankings for each of the top five search providers will also work similarly for all the other “top 400″ search providers using the same search engine.
This is just another cheap marketing technique used to lure in those who have been drawn to the web with aspirations of cashing in on the internet. I have personally been involved recently with a so-called web developer who is of the cut-and-paste variety. Her skills are limited to what code she finds on the internet. Primarily she runs the web-hosting/website development/PHP-Nuke scam on small mom-and-pops who don’t know any better. On this one deal I was lending some advice on, the chick had the meta tags on every page spammed to draw hits from people who would use her hosting/web design service instead of her client’s services. The client didn’t know what meta tags were for or even that they existed. The web site developer didn’t have the integrity not to cheat the client. She didnt even have the courtesy to put her spam in alongside with her client’s keywords, she only put in here own keywords.
She also pulled another common stunt found amongst the incompetent and insecure: she would not give the client access to most of the cPanel/PHPAdmin in an effort to maintain complete control over the account and minimize efforts to get rid of her sorry ass.
And finally, she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. She left unpatched all the KNOWN security glitches in PHP-Nuke and subsequently used those back doors to attack her former client’s website. After being told her services would no longer be required and all the security patches were applied, she called the hosting service and scammed her client’s user name and password from some idiot working there and went into the site she had been paid to create and destroyed it. Of course she didn’t have enough integrity to have provided her client with any kind of backup strategy.
The kicker is that her whole portfolio of sites got hacked by another like-minded piece of shit using the same back doors she left open. The vast majority of her significant portfolio was concentrated in the repossession industry. Go ahead, have a chuckle. You know what happened. I love it when the wheel comes full circle. Don’t you.
If you ran one of the industry’s top trade associations how well would you like it getting out that you had been maintaining an insecure site and that some ditzy flake was running around with the keys to the kingdom? Not very well, I think. Especially when you consider the degree to which the trade associations preach about how their members are experienced, well-trained, and in many cases credentialed as the reasons clients should use their members over the other, fly-bynight operations. How do they expect the clients to buy into this idea when it appears they dont even practice what they preach when they purchase professional services.
I wonder what percent of the hosting re-sellers/web developers fall into this criminal category? I wonder what percent of the crap we put up with in our in-boxes, referrer lists, comments, and such are the direct result of idiot, fly-by-night internet service providers who dont have a freaking clue as to what they are doing– like the one involved in the true story above. I bet it is a fairly high number.
I recommended to the lady who got scammed that she file FBI complaints for each separate stunt this chick pulled hacking her site.
This theme of lets get into a business– any business– and scam everyone and everything for all its worth is getting tired. I see it everywhere. These marketing scams make it very difficult for honest people of modest means to make a decent living as a small business owner. Maybe its always been this way and I am just getting more more cumulative evidence of it cause I am getting older.
Oh yeah, the scammer’s name is Debbie Corbin and her company was called Ultimate Designs. I hear she had to relocate her shingle. Heh heh.
If you have any web-scam horror stories, I’d like to hear of them. Post them in the comments of email them to me.
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