Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#11

Post by wesleytodd » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures.

My experience with SEO companies has been horrible.

I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of "optimizations" from one a the startup I currently work for.

My experience while working for one is, by far, the worst. The owner/CEO asked me to lie to a customer and tell them I did work that he had actually outsourced to India. "In the future, try to funnel these things through you. Instead of saying, 'I will pass that on to the developer', say, 'I will take care of that'".

I feel like their skills are hard to quantify, and because of this a lot of people get sucked in on questionable sales pitches. This market then seems to draw the "Snake Oil" type salesmen who find they can get easy money.

Although there are good people offering quality SEO services, I have had 100% bad experiences with them.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#12

Post by bhartzer » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

dmschulman wrote: post #5

SEO companies, especially the shady ones in my experience, like to be particularly litigious. Is there an equivalent of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in Canada? Contacting the BBB and filing a claim is definitely a way to get some momentum, lots of businesses in the USA at least depend on having a good, clean BBB rating.

This is not a true SEO company. Honest SEO firms that deal with organic/natural search engine rankings wouldn't do such a thing. It's a shame that companies like this give the honest SEO firms a bad rep.

Did the company in question ever say that they were an SEO firm in their sales pitch or just an online marketing agency?

Personally, I would contact the medical board, see a lawyer about what the doctor's rights are, and file a UDRP domain dispute to get ahold of that domain name.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#13

Post by iharris » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

Some good advice so far; thanks, everyone!

My wife is in contact with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to keep them abreast of the situation. We'll see if she can engage their lawyers. She's also documenting everything as it has happened.

I did a little bit of snooping through WHOIS records. I think the SEO company is based in Montreal so we might be able to do something domestically about it.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#14

Post by hdevalence » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

varsketiz wrote: post #9

I remember meeting some French guys in one of SF's startup accelerators who had a similar startup - to create websites for small businesses from crawled data and do serious SEO for these websites, then once customers inquiry or try to register for appointments online or whatnot, they would send the original business an email saying something along the lines of "claim your website - you have customers waiting". While…

It does not sound like a decent idea.

'Decent' is not a word that fits with 'deceptive practices', 'impersonation', or 'extortion'.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#15

Post by BrainInAJar » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

wesleytodd wrote: post #11

Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures. My experience with SEO companies has been horrible. I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of…

SEO, as an industry, is shysters. Even "good" SEO is still a service designed to break search engines. A scummy industry is going to attract scummy people, it just becomes a question of to what degree they are scummy.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#16

Post by sharkweek » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

BrainInAJar wrote: post #15

wesleytodd wrote: post #11

Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures. My experience with SEO companies has been horrible. I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of…

SEO, as an industry, is shysters. Even "good" SEO is still a service designed to break search engines. A scummy industry is going to attract scummy people, it just becomes a question of to what degree they are scummy.

No, good SEO is designing a page that is perfectly crawlable by bots (this is still difficult for most people, especially for larger websites and people who aren't familiar with webmaster best practices), and researching/creating/promoting relevant content to attract links.

There are of course shady people in the SEO world, but most of the "one cool trick to help you rank better" tactics are long gone as Google has done a pretty good job squashing those through algo updates.

Saying "SEO is still a service to break search engines" is incredibly misguided - Organic search is a ridiculously powerful growth opportunity for brands as ranking #1 for proper keywords can be a multimillion dollar marketing value add. To sell that short is incredibly foolish, and every brand worth their weight should truly believe they deserve to rank #1 for relevant terms, why not work to achieve this?

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#17

Post by readme » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

You need to talk to a lawyer. It's extremely likely the law protects him on this matter.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#18

Post by sologoub » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

I've been seeing a good number of google maps listings hijacked by marketing companies. One restaurant a co-worker of mine advises in her spare time contracted a company that provides online food delivery lead gen. services (similar to grubhub, but not them). They take a cut of every order.

The restaurant owner is a friend of my co-worker and asked her to help with their website and local marketing to drive more business in addition to the lead gen company. When she dug into it, turns out the lead gen business conned the hostess into turning over the google maps account via the phone verification and everyone that looked up the restaurant in google to order went through the lead gen service, where they should have gone directly to the restaurant, saving the restaurant the lead gen commission.

While one might argue that this is legitimate, the owner of the restaurant had no idea and felt cheated.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#19

Post by wesleytodd » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

BrainInAJar wrote: post #15

wesleytodd wrote: post #11

Agreed that you should have your lawyer contact them with a threatening email. Also, you could have a friend "hire" them for some small service just to get their information. Then provide that to your lawyer to pursue more substantial legal measures. My experience with SEO companies has been horrible. I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of…

SEO, as an industry, is shysters. Even "good" SEO is still a service designed to break search engines. A scummy industry is going to attract scummy people, it just becomes a question of to what degree they are scummy.

@sharkweek The problem here is that SEO companies are usually not equipped to solve those problems. Their developers are usually secondary roles in the company, and might even be second-rate themselves.

Also, good/real SEO usually requires content writers. Which is an ongoing process, and is probably not worth the cost to most small businesses.

Re: Ask HN: An SEO startup is impersonating a physician. What should I do?

#20

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4

This is a pretty normal offshore scam these days. File a proper DMCA/phishing complaint with their hosting provider & Google. File a phishing complaint with their upstream phone provider. All their shady SEO tactics will get them de-ranked in a few weeks regardless of what you do so it's only a short term problem.

It appears to not be off-shore but Canadian local (Montreal).