Let’s face it: any search engine optimization company knows that the industry has had a collective black eye for many years. This is unfortunate, because there are so many companies that do outstanding work that must fight for sheer legitimacy simply because there are so many fly-by-night companies and snake oil salesmen out there.
This is compounded by the fact that shoddy equipment is almost always less expensive than legitimate companies, so a price-sensitive company’s first experience with a search engine optimization company will likely be negative. They may not see results at all, or the suspicious company may actually get the site penalized in the search engines by using unacceptable tactics. Paying a search engine optimization company to penalize your site is a lot like paying an auto mechanic to blow out your car’s gas tank, except you can’t see the cool bang and bad optimization company. Search engines, unlike the charred mechanic, usually escapes unscathed.
However, there is yet another way for a search engine optimization company to gain 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 finally complied. After a while, “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) informed us 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.
It turned out that Mario had been posing as us to obtain our materials, as he was opening a search engine optimization company in Atlanta. This alone isn’t particularly disturbing: companies do it all the time, and imitation is the sincerest (if most annoying) form of flattery. The disturbing thing is that he rebranded our proposal without changing even a word. Particularly galling is the fact that he was so clever in the way he stole our materials, but he was so monumentally foolish that he never considered that we might present the same perspective one day.
Mario has a new website that has a blog bragging about how he’s going to crush his Atlanta competition, and how that’s going to come as a nasty surprise to all of us. His blog certainly has some nasty surprises: I recently wrote an article about resource areas on websites and why they’re important. The day after that article went public, a new article was posted on his blog about, you guessed it, resource areas on websites and why they’re important. There’s that annoying flattery thing again.
What is the lesson to learn? Well, for one thing, Mario could have skipped his business ethics class. More important:
- I am not a lawyer, but I recommend that you record all your website materials, your proposals and your sales materials. Do it before making them public. If someone copies your materials and you have the official copyright (and the person is worth something), you’ll likely get a lawyer to take the case on contingency.
- Use a service like CopyScape (www.copyscape.com) to regularly monitor your website to make sure others aren’t plagiarizing it. When you find plagiarism and you own the copyright, you may again be able to get a lawyer on a contingency basis.
- Do regular searches on your company name and trademarks. Many people are in for a nasty surprise when they see their company being misrepresented on competing sites, or their competitors using brand names that are uncannily similar to theirs.
- If you can afford it, do Dun and Bradstreet checks on all companies that solicit your business. Also, call the company personally and verify that the person who originally contacted you actually works there.
These are just some of the things you can do to protect your materials, trademarks, and brand, whether you are a search engine optimization company or have any other type of business. For more detailed advice, I would suggest speaking with an attorney who specializes in this type of offense (like myself).
So where do we leave things with Mario? After my attorney sent him a cease and desist letter, we turned the tables, went undercover, and asked him for a proposal. 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 small, and ethical SEO professionals stick together. Although we are competitors, we recognize that there is a lot of business out there and that it is in our best interest to try to raise the bar in the industry. My company investigated and found that Mario had stolen not only our materials, but also materials from at least four other companies (using the same premise). The additional materials in the second proposal that we had seen from Mario were copied verbatim from another search engine optimization company. Mario didn’t seem to get any smarter; in fact, he was spinning a larger and more dangerous web of ineptitude.
Using only known facts, we reported to 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 same companies from which the materials were derived (in these cases, as you may suspect, Mario does not do so well).
I could sue Mario, but a quick check reveals that he’s really worthless. Certainly not worth more of my time. But I have done what I felt had to be done. I have warned every search engine optimization company in town about your practices and provided them with all the materials they will need to prove that you are unethical and that any prospect should probably look elsewhere. After all, given the choice, who would choose to work with a thief at a company with a stellar reputation?
Mario, given his well-deserved negative reputation in the Atlanta SEO community, it would surely be for the best if he changed the name of his search engine optimization company, bought a new domain, and started over, this time doing the work himself and writing their own materials.
Of course, I’m not going to tell him that. Let the lack of business from him be an unpleasant surprise for him.
(c) Medium Blue 2007
