With merely a bad service or product, we might push for a discount or refund, and write some negative reviews about a company at various ratings sites like Yelp. But, when it’s an actual scam artist, it becomes a question of how to reach them in the first place, and then how to do anything that they’d even feel.

In the local search marketing world, many of us have noticed a spate of bad actors who are setting up fraudulent business listings (perhaps even operating under bogus names), and once they’ve lured people into doing business with them, they abscond with fees in return for shoddy service or no service/product whatsoever. So, there are some basic issues around how they are operating with impunity, promoting themselves online (sometimes out-ranking bona fide established local businesses), and then taking consumers’ money with zero accountability.

So, here are some tips we’ve made to help you REACH LOCAL SCAM ARTISTS and even thwack ‘em!  You may not be able to get your lost time and money back, but you may get a little justice or you might be able to declaw these bad guys just a bit so they can’t prey on other consumers as easily.

Tips To Reach Local Scam Artists & Thwack ‘Em:

• Get them de-listed! Is it a bogus local listing in a directory or search engine? In other words, if you drove up to the street address they’re listed under, is there an actual company office there where you can talk to an employee of the business? Bogus listings have been a dire problem where some services like locksmiths are concerned. If there’s no business representative at the place where their online address is listed in Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc — then, that is a bogus listing. For these cases, contact the search engine or directory site and inform them that it’s a bogus listing.
• Narc on ‘em! If someone is dishonest in one thing, chances are they may be doing other bad stuff, too! Look critically at their website — are they using someone else’s copyrighted text or images? If so, inform the people they’ve lifted content from, and this could get their sites delisted from search engines like Google if it’s reported properly.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or “DMCA” law) allows owners of copyrighted material to demand that sites take down content which has been taken from them.
• Reveal who they are! In times past, all sorts of conmen would set up websites pretending to be someone they weren’t. But, people can’t always hide behind a webpage any more — you should familiarize yourself with looking up domain name registration information. The URL domain name of the website of a scam company might, just might, let you discover the name of the person who set up the business. You can look the URL domain name owner information up at many different “WHOIS” services out there, although I prefer the Domain Dossier provided at Hexillion’s Central Ops. Go there, type the domain name (“example.com”) of the bad company into the search box, then hit return. Under the Domain Whois record, see who it is that is listed under the Registrant information. In some cases, the bad guys will have obscured the info by using some front company to hide who they are. Even so, you can see who is providing the domain registration service for them, and you could use that info to contact them through an attorney’s note and demand that they tell you who is behind a site so that you know who you’re dealing with.
• Complain to their website host! The Domain Dossier also reveals where the website is being hosted. Using this, you can figure out who their ISP (“Internet Service Provider”) is, and you can call them up and complain that the website is fraudulent/criminal. Some ISPs may then determine that the scam company has broken their terms and conditions, and this might result in them pulling the plug on the scam website.
• Check out the IP address of their website’s domain, too! Websites are often co-hosted on a server along with many other websites, so if you search to find out what other domain names may be associated with the same IP address, you might discover other sites and other businesses that the scam artist may be using as a front. Tread carefully with this, though, because they could just be using cheap hosting, and other domains on the same IP address may be completely unrelated to your bad guy.
• Reverse search on the web and in local search engines by the company’s phone number. This may further reveal other businesses that the bad actor is using to take advantage of people.
• Discover the business owner through the local tax office. In many localities, con men obscure their identities through using “doing business as” or “DBA” names, and these may be required to be registered with local tax offices in order for bank accounts to be set up. Contact local tax offices to see what they have filed on business names in order to help you reveal the persons responsible.
• Thwack ‘em with negative reviews! Be sure to rate them negatively in Google Maps, online yellow pages, Yelp, and at the Better Business Bureau. When searching for their type of business or by their business name, carefully look at what pages and sites are ranking. Any page which lists this business might be an opportunity for you to go in and disclose how they treated you and what your experience with them was. In one widely-reported, egregious case, a reprehensible online merchant received numerous bad reviews online, resulting in coverage in an article on the New York Times, and ultimately the owner was arrested and will likely face criminal charges.
• Blog about ‘em! If you already have a blog, write a post with the title begining with the bad business’s name and describe your interactions with them. Honest description of what they did to you could really hurt their bottom line! There are many cases out there of how individual bloggers have taken even major corporations to task, resulting in serious impacts to a company’s business.
• Report them to the authorities! If what they did to you was illegal, report the company to your local district attorney’s office, and to the state attorney general. Ask your local police for suggestions, and report the company wherever they may be operating.
• Take away their phones! In some cases we know of, locals complained to the phone company about a local scam artist that set up multiple, bogus online listings for their business, and the consumer complaints resulted in the bad guys losing their phone numbers. The phone company might be a good resource for getting info on the real names of owners behind the scam company, too.
• Take ‘em to small claims court! Assuming your total dollar amount isn’t too big, file suit against them in small claims court. You might not be able to get them to show up, or even pay, but it can be useful to you if you go through the process to get a judgement against them. You’ll need to’ve found a way to indentify the true company or individual’s name behind the scam company already, though.
• Form a mob! Know others targeted by the same scam artists? Get them to join you in reporting the offenses. There’s not only safety in numbers, but believability and priority. If enough people report the same company, it becomes progressively harder for the complaints to be ignored or neglected.

Using these tips should help you to actually reach the local scam artists, and thwack ‘em where it hurts!

If you have additional ideas for thwacking the bad guys, please add them below in the comments.

Berman states that while the market in 2006 may’ve allowed Verizon to take billions in the deal divesting itself of its directories corporation, Idearc, he further states:

“It took too much.”

Will there be any consequences for Verizon’s throwing off these companies with unserviceably high debt loads? Burman reports:

“These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon.”

In a brief video piece, David Berman debates the issue with Evan Newmark, who takes the opposite viewpoint that Verizon should not be held responsible for the performance of its divested companies.

I find part of Newmark’s argument in the vid segment to be facile. He initially argues that Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, did a clever/good thing because “…he unloaded these companies before they could go under within Verizon!” This is just plain dumb, because they wouldn’t have failed within Verizon. In the case of Idearc, the business unit was too small to cause the great corporate mother ship to founder, and it’s the Verizon spin-off debt load it was saddled with that caused it to be unable to function in the first place. He misses the point that Verizon took too much money out of the spinoff deals. Those weren’t existing debts associated with those business units prior to their divestment.

These companies wouldn’t have “gone under” within Verizon. It’s possible that if a business unit starts to lose money for a quarter or two, the board would naturally require it to correct itself in some way. But, arguably these companies experienced a much higher degree of financial problems due to the extremely high debt they were required to service subsequent to spinoff. These spinoffs funded Verizon’s FiOS expansion — a gigantic project that was paid for by Verizon offloading the investment costs to the companies it spunoff.

So, this was not at all a normal case of companies failing to survive in the competitive marketplace: they were sandbagged at the outset.

In the video, Berman cogently states that “…it raises the question of what responsibility does a seller have to the health of a buyer’s target afterwards…”.

To this, Newmark responds, “Caveat emptor” (well-known Latin phrase meaning “Let the buyer beware.”). One wonders if Mr. Newmark would be quite so glib if he were on the receiving end of a lemon the next time he purchases an automobile. I think not. This is essentially what I’m stating has happened to stockholders of these Verizon spinoff companies.

Newmark finally, grudgingly, states that because it’s a heavily-regulated company, “…Verizon cannot be doing deals which appear to rip people off…”.

I’d go a bit further and say that if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, it’s a rat.

It will be interesting to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission gives Verizon a pass on their spinoffs of bankrupt companies as Newmark seems to think reasonable, or if they don’t respond in some way to consumer and state government complaints.

As you may know, Pay-Per-Post involves paying bloggers to write articles endorsing products, services or companies, and in this flavor it also involves using those posts to link back to the company’s site in order to help build PageRank.

The blog post is very thinly disguised payola – as Kohler points out, the blog is purportedly belonging to someone in Arkansas, while this post appears to be all oriented around providing keyworded links involving Pizza in Minneapolis through DexKnows. The blog has a large “payperpost” ad badge on it, too, and if you read through the articles, every single one seems to be engineered to sound like someone writing about random daily life incidents, but always with a couple of injected keyword links.

In context, it’s glaringly obvious that the blog is a paid posting. Kohler posts a comment below it, asking if it’s a paid post for Dex, and the author replies that she doesn’t “know who’s Dex”.

Kohler further pokes fun at Ken Clark, a yellow pages industry advocate, for also linking to that blog post and citing it as a golden example of how valuable the general public finds print yellow pages. Again, Kohler posts a comment below Clark’s blog post, challenging him for linking to it while while calling it an example of a consumer’s “actual experience”.

Clark responds back defensively, saying that there’s no reason to think it’s a pay-per-post piece!

While trying to insist that the original post isn’t payola is pretty laughable, it seems obvious that Clark was just innocently duped by the faux blog. The YP industry has been in a very defensive mode lately due to bad press about print YP viability versus online ad competition, and it’s unfortunate when the legacy industry advocates display this sort of naïveté with new media — it really tends to undermine their case to some degree when they demonstrate a lack of savviness in the new marketplace.

Here are some of the other pages I found linking to DexKnows which also appear dubious:

www.livelaughblogg.com/2008/08/find-dentist-in-minneapolis.html

www.productivus.com/blog/2008/07/phone-directory/

www.joy32-joy.com/2008/08/dexknows-las-vegas.html

www.obstaclesandglories.com/2008/08/dexknows-flagstaff.html

www.langging.com/2008/08/minneapolis-directory.html

Once you visit a few of these, the types of blogs they are posted upon all begin to seem to be faux, and the posts themselves begin to all appear fraudulent.

This whole interchange illustrates what sort of problems there are with pay-for-post done badly, and DexKnows is likely now to reap some considerable Google penalty for getting involved in this sort of thing.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with pay-per-post, so long as it’s clearly labeled as a paid sponsorship message of some sort. When it’s not clearly labeled, it fools people into thinking it’s an objective endorsement.

Google and the other search engines take a dim view of paid links which seek to manipulate natural search rankings. Google penalizes pay-per-post blogs when they detect them for this reason.

In fact, I heard Matt Cutts state at SMX Advanced a few months ago that Google is likely to devalue links obtained through any duplicitous means, including viral link bait (such as shocking ficticious stories engineered for the purpose of rapidly building up PageRank).

Link-building is one common component of search engine optimization, so it’s not all that surprising that R.H. Donnelley would be doing it in some fashion for their DexKnows.com site. However, link-building is also an extremely sensitive area where the search engines are concerned, and using really aggressive tactics like this are very dangerous. Here in this case, some amount of money has been expended to obtain paid blog postings, but now it’s likely that all that money has been wasted as these sites will undoubtedly get any PR yanked, if they had any to begin with.

It’s quite possible that DexKnows.com didn’t know that this sort of thing was being done. They may have provided some link-building budget to an agency or external contractor, and they may not’ve been aware of what was being done in their name. If this is the case, it would likely be worthwhile for them to clean up what was done, discontinue contract with that agency, and send Google an apology note.

There are plenty of ways of doing link development that do not run against the search engines’ guidelines.

I employed a number of best-practice style link-building strategies when I worked at Superpages.com. One of the most basic strategies is to build valuable, useful content which people will want to link to. For instance, links from .EDU sites are some of the most valuable in terms of ranking power, but very hard to achieve since universities and schools are generally not open to being paid to link to commercial interests. So, we built campus yellow pages for hundreds of universities and colleges across the U.S., and this resulted in many of those schools linking back to Superpages.com.

For the same amount of resource time and expense, you can build something that’s bona fide as opposed to something intended to fool the search engines.

Although his research was really pretty definitive in my mind, there are so many search marketers that have some sort of nostalgic devotion to the tag and who continue to obsess over it and insist upon using it. There is a sort of mentality that “if it might help, then I’m damn well going to use it.” (See this recent thread at WebMasterWorld where quite a few express this viewpoint.)

However, I see some compelling reasons to avoid using it altogether…

Yahoo may be using it only as a “signal of last resort” — if they can’t find content matching a keyword search through other, preferable signals such as visible page body text, they might only then fall back on meta keyword content. As such, the keywords tag may not provide any sort of additional ranking weight, but may only be worthwhile when no other pages or visible text content matches terms. In this case, if you already have the terms in the visible text of the page, it’s just not necessary to have it in the Meta Keywords tag – your page likely won’t rank any better than it already does.

Google may still be using the content as I’ve outlined previously (see this article on the Resurrection of the Keyword Meta Tag), though not as a keyword ranking factor. It may be used by them as a negative ranking factor used to assess a page’s quality or to detect spam and “over-optimized” pages. For instance, they may be checking the tag to insure it represents text actually found on the page and that it’s not too crammed-up with terms. Pages with unrelated words in the meta keyword content or which are stuffed too much might be singled out for lower quality scores or penalizations.

If I’m correct, then the meta keywords tag can’t really help your natural search optimization, but it could easily hurt it. I’ve seen so many cases where people have placed all identical meta keywords tags throughout their site, or included words not found on the page, or over-stuffed the tags — since so many people do this wrong, it’s better just to leave it off entirely. It’s just not worth it.

One aspect of search rankings I’ve written about before is the theory of a site’s quality — a “quality score” very likely is applied by Google (and to lesser degrees, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search) to quantify how much they may trust a site for ranking purposes and for users’ safety. There are a number of factors which might feed into a site’s quality score (including Google’s human quality auditors’ scoring), and one major factor that could be used might be a site’s Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy pages are supposed to disclose to users how the data resulting from their interactions with a site might be used by the company operating that site. Simply the fact that a site *has* a Privacy Policy page posted could very well set it apart from a great many “thin-content” domainer sites and other sites of very low quality. Most major corporation websites and Internet Retailer 500 sites sport a Privacy Policy page, so sites which do not offer a posted policy for users to read may be earmarking themselves as being somewhat suspect or of lower quality.

Also, sites which do not offer a “Platform for Privacy Preferences Project” or P3P protocol in page headers or in a file on their site servers might also be indicating a slightly inferior status.

Taking it even a step further, what if there were algorithmic means of detecting whether a site is actually *following* their stated practices in their posted Privacy Policy page and P3P? Certainly, it seems entirely credible that engines like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live who might also have access to email spam reports could compare the frequency of such reports along with the offending notes’ originating IP addresses and domains and see if the websites at such locations have Privacy Policies which seem to be seriously out of sync with what they’re actually doing.

So, for the sake of insuring that your site passes some potential quality scoring assessments, I suggest the following:

• Have a Privacy Policy page, linked from most of your site’s page footers, which humans may read;
• Follow P3P standards by having an HTTP head declaration, or HTML header declaration, or XML file stored at /w3c/p3p.xml on your server so that you’re disclosing your privacy policy in machine-readable format;
• Periodically review to insure your posted policy is accurate;

Increasingly, quality issues are impacting a site’s natural search marketing presence, so keeping a handle on the factors that can impact quality scores is becoming a vital component of search engine optimization.

Some companies are not following their own Privacy Policies, according to this Forbes article published today. That article indicates that many companies’ security and compliance officers are unaware of the actual privacy practices followed by their marketing departments. This indicates to me that there’s also a high likelihood that many companies are likely posting privacy policy pages and P3P files which are incorrect as well.

These companies are courting disaster in terms of negative publicity as well as their rankings in search engines by being out of compliance with their own stated policies.

(Also check out this other detailed article on the subject by Bill Slawski, “Privacy Policies And Search Engines“.)

“Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings on Major Search Engines”

Now, if you’ve been around the search marketing industry very long at all, you’re probably aware that most of the guides for “picking the right SEO firm” or “how to choose an ethical SEO” recommend staying away from companies which guarantee rankings. For instance, check out the advice from Shari Thurow, David Wallace, MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit, and Chris Sherman.

For that matter, Google themselves warn against companies which promise rankings:

“Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings…”

The reason why search marketing experts recommend against agencies that promise top rankings is that (1) agencies don’t control the search engines – they are autonomous and will rank whatever sites they wish, (2) for some types of industries and keywords there is already a huge amount of competition and smaller companies may not be able to outrank already-established contenders.

Good search marketing agencies do guarantee that they’ll use the best practices and methods they’ve found effective in the past to help improve overall rankings. This is just like the stock market, though, and the caveat that applies to investment firms and stock purchasing apply to search engine marketing similarly: past results do not guarantee future performance.

Obsessing over one or two desirable or prestigious keywords may actually be ineffective, depending on your situation. As we’ve seen many times over at Netconcepts, the long tail of natural search is where most companies may find the “holy grail” of ecommerce. Instead of spending 90% of your effort on ranking for a couple of prestige terms, spending that effort across your site on a great many pages and term combinations can result in small, incremental ranking improvements for many thousands or millions of less-popular keyword search phrase combinations, resulting in far greater traffic than is found through prestige terms. Sure, keyword ranking is important, but the Law of Diminishing Returns applies here – for some industries, the amount of effort required to get ranking on a popular term may be so high that it both costs you resources that would be better spent on your many other potential keywords, and the prestige term ranking could be entirely unattainable anyway.

I now see that others have been also decrying Network Solutions’ guarantees as well (Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable , Gabriel Goldenberg at SEOmoz , etc.).

It’s amazing to me that Network Solutions continues to promise rankings in spite of this being such an obvious worst practice. This might be a case where industry certifications would help. Astonishing that they blithely continue to market themselves in this way, despite industry criticism!

Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization.

I’ve seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains — each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are very clear on this subject:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Most large corporate websites have some level of accidental duplicate content, but if you deploy dozens or hundreds of subdomains with all dupe text, it will appear that you’re purposefully trying to spam the search engines — don’t do it.

If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I’d say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines’ perspective. There’s lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.

Don’t freak out if you have a few subdomains — this is also natural. Many major websites host different site sections and applications on subdomains, and some have external providers delivering content on separate servers — it’s very easy in those cases to assign a subdomain to the third party that’s providing service for you. As long as you’re not duplicating the main content of your pages on the subdomains, this is fine.
Finally, I’ve had a number of people ask my opinion regarding foreign languages — which is better, subdomain or subdirectory.

I actually prefer using separate top-level domains (“TLDs”) for this purpose, since it allows you to send a very clear signal to the search engines that particular content is intended for various countries. For instance, your French language pages could be delivered on .FR domains like: www.example.fr

However, if for some reason you don’t wish to use foreign TLDs for your alternate language pages, you should not worry overly about using separate subdomains versus directory/subdirectories. “french.example.com” will likely function just as well as “www.example.com/french/” in my opinion. I believe that translated versions of pages are NOT counted as duplicate content because they essentially contain very different text. Yes, the information may be duplicated, but the text content is not, and pages in two different languages are far less likely to both come us as relevent for the same keyword search.

So, for foreign language pages, I recommend separate TLDs for best performance, or else use whatever approach is easiest for you to set up and maintain.

Software security company Sunbelt blogged about how the attack was generated: a network of spambots apparently added links into blog comments and forums pointing to the bad sites over a period of months in some cases, enabling those sites to achieve fair rankings in search engine result pages for a great many potential keyword search combinations. The pages either contained iframes which attempted to load malware onto visitors machines or perhaps they began redirecting to the sites containing malware at some point after achieving rankings. Sunbelt provided interesting screenshots of the SERPs in Google:

(click to enlarge)

And also showed some screenshots of some of the keyword-stuffed pages which apparently got indexed:

(click to enlarge)

I think it’s not at all a coincidence that the attack was timed to occur right on the first weekend of the holiday shopping season and Cyber Monday when more people are likely conducting keyword searches than any other time of year. Deploying the malware now was likely intended to infect as many computers as possible before the malware was detected and the sites deleted from listings.

The methods these unethical developers used are pretty “classic” black-hat tactics. For many years now, blackhat optimizers have used automated agents to insert keyworded textlinks into blog and forum comment areas and online guestbooks, pointing back to their sites in an effort to built PageRank. In addition, really old and crusty black hat techniques include keyword stuffing — adding tons of keywords on a page in an effort to make the page relevant for words and phrases. Also, the bait-and-switch technique of allowing one page to get indexed by search engines while redirecting human users to a different URL is pretty well known.

In recent months, Google has apparently been working particularly industriously to penalize more sites that may be buying/selling links or which may be involved in various linking schemes. So much so, that there’s been considerable talk about how some of the affected sites may’ve been unfairly red-flagged by bad assumptions made by their algorithmic policing software. So, it’s disappointing that a network of egregious malware sites were able to effectively employ legacy black-hat tactics which ought to’ve been detectable earlier.

It feels a bit like having the police devote all their time to writing minor speeding tickets while violent murders are happening!

Now, to be fair, any site which appears on the level could suddenly start redirecting to a bad location, and there’d naturally be a period of time before the search engine bots re-spider the page and realize that there’s malware on it. During that window of time between when it was first spidered while appearing alright and the time later when it starts launching evil, it could naturally continue to appear in the SERPs where innocent people could click on it and get infected. Also, the term combinations that Sunbelt cited were moderately arcane in some cases, so average users might not’ve been impacted by any significant numbers. It could also be that Sunbelt might well be hyping-up the issue in order to get attention for themselves, so you have to consider their assessment as possibly non-objective.

Even so, just the fact that this rather pedestrian combination of black-hat tactics could be used to effectively poison search results with malware listings is significant and disturbing.

Why wasn’t the comment spam detected early on? One assumes that the slow accretion of links over months may not’ve set off alarms, or perhaps the comment text added was made to be cleverly relevant.

And, the spam-laden content of the pages looks blatantly unnatural to me — that should’ve also been detectable.

And how about perhaps being suspicious of gobbledy-gook domain names? And, domains ending in “.CN”? I know gobbledy-gook in of itself might be hard to detect (particularly considering all the gobbledy-gook that still slips past spam filters on email) and unclear in of itself if it represents a bad content site, but you’d perhaps expect that one could tell whether the character strings contained patterns which match names/words by some percentage of fuzziness, and red-flag those that don’t match more normal naming patterns — associate lower trust scores or quality scores with them.

Even sadder, some of the domain names involved were so new they should’ve easily been detectable and flagged as suspicious just on that basis alone. For instance, I just looked up registration info for one of the sites IDed by SunBelt, luewusxrijke.cn, and found that it’d only been registered on November 24th! Why didn’t registrar status provide enough distrust to “sandbox” these sites?

(click to enlarge)

It’s not all that surprising that Verizon might do this, since they oppose net neutrality, but for users like myself, this is highly undesirable. I’ve been highly complimentary about Verizon’s FiOS service, because I’ve had excellent speed and high quality from it. I work from home providing expertise around internet technologies, so it’s vital that I be able to clearly experience the internet just as the majority of the rest of internet users out there, so having Verizon meddling with what’s delivered up to me is not cool.

If you all recall, another company did something quite similar to this back in 2003: Verisign previously did something quite similar when they abruptly launched their “Site Finder” service which intercepted all queries to mistyped/nonexistent .COM and .NET domain names and redirected users to a similar sort of search results page that they controlled. Verisign’s action was heavily criticized for interfering with many systems’ processes which expect incorrect domain requests to error out, and VeriSign agreed to suspend the service after ICANN pressured them to halt it.

Now, Verizon’s action isn’t quite as serious, but it’s the very same sort of thing, and while it doesn’t impact the entire internet, it does impact a great many of us who work from home or do hobby programming of various sorts. It’s a bit too little, too late to point out that users can opt out of this, too.

Now, I have my IE browser configged such that it uses a particular service when auto-correcting for this sort of thing, but I don’t have this set up in FireFox, and in that browser I’m getting that Verizon page.

Verizon is making money off of ads delivered on that search results page, so this was intentionally done to their already-paying subscribers in order to increase profits. Unfortunately, a great many of us do not want this sort of “assistance” when browsing the internet, and we get irritable when companies are aggressively inserting themselves between us and the normal process of interacting with the internet.

By the way – for one mistyped domain I did, it appeared that InfoSpace was powering the search results. For another, it was Yahoo! powering the search. I’d suggest that neither of those companies should associate themselves with this sort of business. InfoSpace results:

(click to enlarge)

Verizon: not cool! I shouldn’t have to go in and opt-out of this sort of thing, and you should’ve notified me in advance before interfering with my internet access. Are you using the same software that the Chinese goverment uses to control their citizen’s internet access?

Verizon has tried to fight off net neutrality through propaganda, issuing statements like that of Peter Davidson, Verizon’s senior vice president for federal government relations:

“…Net Neutrality – better named Net Regulation – is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist…”

Um…. they’re just not convincing me with stuff like what they’ve done in this example.

However, I think there’s still a case where Google may be using the Meta Keywords tag…

If you’re unfamiliar, the Meta Keywords tag is placed within the <HEAD> of webpage code, and it was originally intended to inform software agents as to what the subject matter of the document was. For instance, a page about football could have a meta keywords tag like this:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”football, sports, NFL”>

Just as Danny outlined, this hidden keyword content with webpages was rapidly abused by many webmasters, as they added in terms unrelated to their page’s content, and stuffed repetitions of keywords into the tag in hopes of ranking higher.

Many search engines stopped using it altogether for keyword relevancy assessment and ranking, and even those search engines using it today may have considerable checks and balances in place to try to detect attempts to abuse through the tag.

I actually think that Google may still be using it as a factor for detecting spammish pages. As Danny’s testing shows, they’re not using it at all for relevancy nor ranking on content in the tag. But, it could still be useful to them as an indicator of sites which are attempting to use black-hat methods to manipulate search rankings.

It’s seemed very clear that Google is computing a quality score in association with web-pages, and meta tags that are stuffed full of words that are highly unrelated to the content on their respective pages would be a prime indicator that a site may be attempting to use black-hat methods. It could be used as a strike against a page, but not as a factor that would help a page.

Danny reported that Google engineers have confused people to some degree by inconsistently communicating about the tags. Danny says that the engineers will answer the question of whether they “use” or “read” the keywords metatag literally, by saying that Google “reads” the tag, which leads people to think that Google uses the tag contents. Danny’s interpretation is that engineers like Evan Roseman are only stating that Google takes and caches the entire page code (which would require that their Googlebot spider “read” the page), but that they don’t use that part of the page for ranking/relevancy – they ignore it as a direct ranking factor. True, but another interpretation could be that Google is using it only as an indirect, negative factor as I’m suggesting. Google doesn’t want to expose all of their criteria for building quality scores, and that could explain the slight inconsistency in messaging over this topic.

So, Danny’s article shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to begin resurrecting meta keyword tags in a big way, with all the traditional abuses which destroyed the intended function to begin with. As he points out, it could be useful to use for misspellings, but use of it should be extremely conservative or not at all. I vote for avoiding it entirely.