Managing SEO Risk via Dumb Affiliate Marketing
A while ago Christoph Cemper shot me an email about his post about ______.
Personal experience and a wide variety of friends have helped me conclude that most hosts are garbage, so a bad host in and of itself is not a big story. ________, on the other hand allegedly sent out an email offering affiliates a $100 bonus for knocking Cemper's site out of the top 10 rankings.
They could have contacted Christoph directly and tried to fix their problems, or they also could have reranked the search results a bit more discretely. What is even worse about how they sent out that email is that one of their affiliates posted it to the page which talks negatively about their service, which shows how they aim to slience it. Talk about not breeding trust in a service!
Christopher could also build a ton of links from almost anyone burned by a bad __________ hosting experiece by creating an image button and asking them to use it to link to his page about them.
Any time you use shady techiques to manipulate the search results (which most all SEOs - including me - are guilty of), and also use mass communication tools to do so (most smart SEOs do not do that unless they are creating crash and burn sites) you raise your risk profile and the chances that your technique will backfire.
Update: ServerPronto has been harrassing me with phone calls, likely about this post. After weeks of waking me up on the phone they still call and call. For doing that I think they are _________. I took their name out of this post, so hopefully that will be enough for them to leave me alone.
Comments
Bob Smith wrote:
"As a customer,
Serverpronto.com
has made me very unhappy."
You don't tell why. I have the opposite experience.
When I started with them (Aug. 2004) I admittedly had doubts about the quality of the service for 2 reasons:
The low price and some exaggerated claims (no provider/server has "99.999% uptime").
I also don't believe that "... you will be delivered a new server that has never been used by another customer".
So if somebody signs up and leaves after 2 months they throw it all away? If they mean "installation" and not "server" they should write it.
Exaggerating backfires from the people they try to attract: IT-professionals who knows their server-management stuff.
So initially I used ServerPronto only for not-too-critical things, like backup, development and experimenting.
To my big surprice it has been an excellent service. Hardware: no quirks detected, disks still intact. Network stability: down about 3*2 hours/year or so. Support: the few times I have needed it, has been fast (same working day or better) and very fast for a couple of urgent reboots. Bandwidth: plenty for our needs.
Now we run all our stuff at ServerPronto.
I have been a customer with serverpronto.com for 2 months now and I have already filed the form to cancel my server. What sucks is that they can't find the papers i faxed them. The people at customer support don't know up from down, and technical suport is even worse. They seem cheap, but in the end they're not very cheap at all - they charge for customer support (which you are going to need if you sign up with them - A LOT), and you only get one reboot for free - after that it costs you $29.. EACH!
Their 99.99% uptime is a total scam! I've had a lot of downtime. I suppose most customers dont notice that (due to that they only run web services on their box). At the most I had multiple days I could not reach my server. They had to reboot the box. When i checked the logs after, the reason was that the server had problems reaching the gateway. And I had not even logged in for over 2 days at that time......
These people don't know what they're doing. PLEASE take my following advice about Server Pronto:
If you value your time and your money;
DONT SIGN UP WITH SERVERPRONTO! STAY AWAY!
I have had them too! Worst company I've ever dealt with - cancelled more than 5 times - customer service didn't "get" it - What a crock! Contacting my lawyer soon
As a customer,
Serverpronto.com
has made me very unhappy.
I became dependent on their service
and that was a very poor choice for me.
I will do much more due diligence in the
future when I pick a hoster.
-Bob
The two components of having a healthy hosting company are to have quality equipment, and then a quality team of support individuals to help when you have problems.
I was with ServerPronto for over 2 years. I had random problems with the server, but in general it was fine.
I had HUGE issues with their support team - both in response time (which could stretch to 8 hours or more) and in deceptive practices. For a full, detailed report, read here -
http://www.aspisfun.com/hosts/reviews/serverpronto.html
ServerPronto?
BAAAAD NEWWS - if you like headaches and pain - use these guys - they are slow, unprofessional, uneducated and cheat, lie, scam, etc. type serverpronto in google and read - nuff said.
what a horrible mistake I made, 1st day, they send wrong login, then next day their whole site and servers go down... no one to call or contact - and I prepaid :(
STAY AWAY if you need some level of quality
They lie to you, make many mistakes, false claims and so on.
If you want a nightmare try Serverpronto.
Oh my god... ServerPronto has given me so much headache I don't know where to start... fraudulent billing, sucky service and those "shady" (at best) techniques to do "reputation management" to wash their names...
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