This is compounded by the fact that the
sleazebag outfits are almost always less expensive than legitimate
firms, so that a price-sensitive company’s first experience with a
search engine optimization company will likely be a negative one.
They may see no results at all, or the shady firm may actually get
the site penalized on search engines by using unacceptable tactics.
Paying a search engine optimization company to get your site
penalized is much like paying an auto mechanic to take a blowtorch to
your car’s gas tank, except you don’t get to see the cool
explosion -- and the bad search engine optimization company, unlike
the charbroiled mechanic, generally escapes unscathed.
There is, however, yet another way for
a search engine optimization company to earn a negative reputation -
by stealing from other, legitimate search engine optimization
companies. What follows is a scenario that recently happened to my
company.
A man (we’ll call him “Mario
Vargas”) approached my search engine optimization company, claiming
to be a potential prospect and asking for proposals and sales
materials. Since he had an email address from what appeared to be a
legitimate website in California, we eventually complied. After some
time, “Mario” finally said that his company had decided to go in
another direction, even though he had “recommended” us.
Soon after, another prospect of ours
(this one actually real) let us know that they had received a
proposal from another search engine optimization company in Atlanta,
and that this proposal was exactly the same as ours, except that the
logos had been changed.
As it turns out, Mario had
misrepresented himself to us in order to get our materials, since he
was opening up a search engine optimization company in Atlanta. This
alone is not particularly disturbing - companies do it all the time,
and imitation is the sincerest (albeit most annoying) form of
flattery. What is disturbing is that he re-branded our proposal
without changing hardly a word. Particularly vexing is the fact that
he was so clever about the way he went about stealing our materials
but was so monumentally dumb that he never considered that we may
pitch the same prospect someday.
Mario has a new website that has a blog
on which he boasts about how he is going to crush his Atlanta
competition, and how that will be a nasty surprise to us all. His
blog certainly has some nasty surprises - I recently wrote an article
about resource areas on websites and why they are important. The day
after that article went public, there was a new article posted on his
blog about - you guessed it - resource areas on websites and why they
are important. There’s that annoying flattery thing again.
What is the lesson to be learned?
Well, for one, that Mario may have skipped his Business Ethics
classes. More importantly:
I am not a lawyer, but I recommend that you copyright all of the materials on your website, your proposals, and your sales materials. Do it before you make them public. If someone copies your materials and you have the official copyright (and the person is worth anything) you will likely get a lawyer to take the case on contingency.
Use a service like CopyScape (www.copyscape.com) to regularly monitor your website and make sure that others are not plagiarizing from you. When you find plagiarism, and you own the copyright, you again may be able to get an attorney on contingency.
Do regular searches on your company name and your trademarks. Many people get unpleasant surprises when they see how their company is being misrepresented on competitor sites, or how their competitors are using trademark names eerily similar to theirs.
If you can afford it, run Dun and Bradstreet checks on all the businesses that solicit your business. Further, call the business personally and verify that the person who originally contacted you does indeed work there.
These are just a few things that you
can do to protect your materials, trademarks, and brand, whether you
are a search engine optimization company or you run any other sort of
business. For more detailed advice I would suggest speaking with an
attorney that specializes in this type of infringement (as I have).
So where did we leave things with
Mario? After my attorney sent him a cease and desist letter, we
turned the tables, went undercover ourselves, and solicited a
proposal from him. The proposal he came back with was substantially
different than the original, but still used much of our content
verbatim.
The Atlanta SEO community is a small
one, and the ethical SEO practitioners stick together. Even though
we are competitors, we recognize that there is plenty of business out
there and that it is in our best interest to attempt to raise the bar
in the industry. My company put some feelers out and discovered that
Mario had stolen not only our materials but also materials from at
least four other firms (using the same premise). The additional
materials in the second proposal we had seen from Mario were copied
verbatim from another search engine optimization company. Mario
didn’t appear to be getting any smarter- in fact, he was weaving a
larger, more dangerous web of ineptitude.
Using only known facts, we informed
every search engine optimization company in town exactly what we knew
- that there was a new company in Atlanta that was stealing
proprietary materials and using them to try to get clients, sometimes
going up against the very firms from whence the materials were
derived (in these cases, as you may suspect, Mario doesn’t do so
well).
I could sue Mario, but a quick check reveals that he really isn’t worth anything. He certainly isn’t worth any more of my time. But I’ve done what I felt needed to be done. I’ve warned each search engine optimization company in the city about his practices and provided them with all the materials they will ever need to prove that he is an unethical person and that any prospects should probably look elsewhere. After all, given the choice, who would opt to work with a thief over a company with a stellar reputation?
Mario, given his well-deserved negative reputation throughout the Atlanta SEO community, would almost certainly be better off changing the name of his search engine optimization company, buying a new domain, and starting over - this time actually doing the work himself and writing his own materials.
Of course, I’m not going to tell him that. Let his lack of business be a nasty surprise to him.