01-15-08
Public Spam Report: Google Your Honeymoon with Rip Off Report has to Stop
*Update* New links at the bottom to some really good cases against Rip Off Report
Before You Jump to any conclusions, I am not saying sites that warn consumers of true scams and rip offs are bad, I think they are very very good. I love the Internet because it levels the playing field for small businesses and individuals to compete with big business. Before the Internet that was impossible. However, I do not think that there should be a place in Google’s search results for a company that does nothing to scan or proof read their “User Generated Content” and that also blatantly spams and violates Google’s TOS. This Brings me to the current marriage of Google and Rip Off Report.
I am sure you are all familiar with Rip Off Report, it is by far the largest database of complaints about businesses, individuals and pretty much anything on the planet from religion to government all the way to Racist remarks. Rip Off Report has been accused of all sorts of shady things, racketeering, black mail and rip offs. I am not going to get into the lawsuits against it’s owner Ed Magedsonon or any of the many allegations of what appears to be shady practices. What I am going to get into is how they are being leveraged to manipulate Google’s search results and how Google is fueling their questionable business.
Rip Off Report thrives off of ranking in Google’s search results, I would say that the only reason they are so popular is because of the relationship they have with Google’s search results. According to Compete.com Rip Off Report receives roughly 606,439 referrals from Google’s search results each month. I bet you wish your site got that many referrals from Google each month, in fact I would say most sites on the net don’t. From October 2007 until now (Jan 2008) those referrals have come from 5,761 different search keywords. Again this is according to Compete. I was curious about how Yahoo and Live treat Rip Off Report in their search results. I don’t think that you will find the results surprising as Google can tend to favor and love certain domains where as Yahoo and Live don’t play favorites as often.
I ran a ranking report on the first 89 keywords that Compete said where their top referring search terms. Here are the results you can download the PDF here
Before You Jump to any conclusions, I am not saying sites that warn consumers of true scams and rip offs are bad, I think they are very very good. I love the Internet because it levels the playing field for small businesses and individuals to compete with big business. Before the Internet that was impossible. However, I do not think that there should be a place in Google’s search results for a company that does nothing to scan or proof read their “User Generated Content” and that also blatantly spams and violates Google’s TOS. This Brings me to the current marriage of Google and Rip Off Report.
I am sure you are all familiar with Rip Off Report, it is by far the largest database of complaints about businesses, individuals and pretty much anything on the planet from religion to government all the way to Racist remarks. Rip Off Report has been accused of all sorts of shady things, racketeering, black mail and rip offs. I am not going to get into the lawsuits against it’s owner Ed Magedsonon or any of the many allegations of what appears to be shady practices. What I am going to get into is how they are being leveraged to manipulate Google’s search results and how Google is fueling their questionable business.
Rip Off Report thrives off of ranking in Google’s search results, I would say that the only reason they are so popular is because of the relationship they have with Google’s search results. According to Compete.com Rip Off Report receives roughly 606,439 referrals from Google’s search results each month. I bet you wish your site got that many referrals from Google each month, in fact I would say most sites on the net don’t. From October 2007 until now (Jan 2008) those referrals have come from 5,761 different search keywords. Again this is according to Compete. I was curious about how Yahoo and Live treat Rip Off Report in their search results. I don’t think that you will find the results surprising as Google can tend to favor and love certain domains where as Yahoo and Live don’t play favorites as often.
I ran a ranking report on the first 89 keywords that Compete said where their top referring search terms. Here are the results you can download the PDF here
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