The Washington State Attorney General announced in a press release yesterday that it was suing a Redmond-based SEO company, Visible.net. According to the Complaint, Visible also does business under the name WebMarketingSource.com, Caputures.com, and Captures.com (that’s not a typo). The AG also names the owner of the companies, Gilbert Walker, as a defendant in the case.
15 Comments
15 Comments
Comments
Read our official response to the AG Release here...http://www.visible.net/visiblog/visiblenet-is-serious-about-customer-service-support/
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?<div>I hope other states follow suit so we can rid the world of incompetent SEO companies.</div>
Perhaps more lawsuits will deter companies from offering SEO services when they don’t know anything about SEO in the first place! Well done, Washington State - I hope there are more to follow!I heard about this story for the first time a couple of days ago when someone tweeted this article from Network World: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35218
See also this thread: http://sphinn.com/story/85048
Honestly, I am not really digging this. Heres why: from my view point many of the claims that Washington state are making aren’t legally "actionable". When cases involving tech issues present them selves in state courts often times well intention prosecutors, jurors, and judges, make bad blanket decisions that are based on their ignorance to the issues at hand. For eample I am willing to bet that the judge that presides over this case has very little knowledge of SEO, if any at all. How can we expect for the system to help our industry with these issues if the system doesn’t fundementally understand our industry?
It is the responsibility of the prosecutors and the court system to call upon respected industry sources to do independent evaluations of the company’s tactics and business practices with regard to SEO. There are likely numerous cases brought against companies in a variety of industries by state prosecutors and presided over by judges who have no first hand knowledge of the subject matter in question. I don’t believe this is as much about the specifics of SEO as it is about companies charging their customers for services they can’t actually provide and, more importantly, making outlandish and misleading claims regarding what their "services" will accomplish in the long run.
I agree. It’s not about SEO itself. Look at the AG’s press release:The suit accuses the defendants of the following violations, among others: Failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and failing to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase traffic to customer Web sites by achieving top search-engine rankings and failing to deliver other promised services.Falsely claiming an affiliation with other marketers including Specialty Merchandise Company, a so-called drop-ship wholesaler.Claiming that its customer service representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.Failing to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.Continuing to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.
@SEOAlyBut my point is that most of the claims that the state is making aren’t legally actionable. I can legally go around telling people that I am the best SEO in the world. Is that true? No. Is that scummy? Yes. No matter what its still legal because it isn’t pointing to any facts.And you are right it is the court’s responsibility to educate themselves with the issues at hand, but often times that doesn’t happen. especially on the state level when a judges docket is backed up and they just want to move on. They call it like they see it.As a result blanket decisions that can and will effect every SEO in Washington State are made in haste, based on a case full legally in-actionab;e claims.
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.
Yeah, i am assuming Sarah Bird would know allot more about this than I. I very briefly studied law in the past, and as a reuslt, I am now an SEO not a attorney! (thank god)
There are a lot of things we don’t know. They can’t be all bad though, they helped you Jill. http://sphinn.com/story/82416Also, hasn’t it always been a practice here on Sphinn to run only one version of a story? Why is there two for this news? Makes it tough going back and forth etc.
@Joe - I do see your point, but the fact remains that small business owners across the country fall victim to scams regularly. Some of the responsibility must be put onto those who hire these agencies in the first place, but the level of ignorance with regard to SEO and how search engines work in general gives those with questionable integrity a greater than average opportunity to take advantage of website owners. While you may not agree with the manner in which this was approached - being that criminal charges have been filed, rather than it being handled in the civil courts - I commend the state of Washington for taking an interest in protecting the citizens of their state from scams, be they by an SEO firm or a charlatan in any other industry. Civil actions against a company rarely result in the company actually changing their business practices and certainly don’t gain the kind of press or deterrent that criminal charges do.That said, if you look at the information from the Attorney General’s press release that qwerty pasted in above, none of those charges are directly related to SEO techniques specifically, but call into question the business practices of the company – like not honoring cancellation requests, continuing to bill after a request to cancel had been submitted, pursuing the collection of those debts, etc. I don’t believe any of the claims listed above are inactionable. If this case results in all SEO companies having to be held accountable to the specifics named above, I’m okay with that. For some reason business owners seem to forget that "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true" also applies to Internet marketing...and in many cases, more so. It’s pretty clear with the number of scammers in the SEO industry that something has to be done, as it reflects negatively on the industry as a whole. I believe part of the reason there are so many scams out there is because there have been so few cases that result in criminal charges being filed…and even if civil cases have been brought, that doesn’t mean the company stops taking advantage of people – it just means they launch another site under another name and scam more people in order to recoup those losses. @Jill – I know nothing of this particular company, but I’d guess there probably isn’t much of a contract to speak of …and if there is, it likely doesn’t match up to the claims made by their telemarketers. It would be pretty cut & dry if a signed contract existed, I’d think.
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!).
Haha, like the Google analogy. Yeah, if the claims turn out to be true, it’s great to see them protecting consumers. Afterall, that’s one reason why they are there. But there may be a lot more to this than meets the eye. For one, it’s close to election time and the AG in that state has been giving a lot of attention to Internet related cases (ie. the recent craigslist prositiution crackdown). That becomes more clear when you look back and see there was another case almost identical to this against another company in that state (kinda sounds like they are pursuing any and all similar claim cases). That leads me to believe that claims in the first case turned out to be true, which really sucks since now it has begun to cause them to look closer into every company with similarities. Some of the things they point out are seem really petty, like the web copy claims, where others seem like they throw up red flags. 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 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.