Thursday 10 January 2013

Reviews Sites ? The Ultimate Scammers? Mindshark Helps you get the Real Story

English: A set of online ads featuring fake ne...
English: A set of online ads featuring fake news scams (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What should we make of Review Sites?

Often you will come across sites ranking the top SEO companies, and showing a list of firms.  Rarely are the listings ever consistent from one site to the next.   So how does one know if these sites are really unbiased?

*** CHECK OUT their policies for ratings.  Call them ,  test them out.   -->   Usually you will find that sites charge heavy "admin fees" to have a firm rated.   These fees can be as high as $2000 / month!!!   Really !? Admin fees?    These are essentially rankings for SALE.    A top example of this is   TOPSEOS.com   This site sells rankings for $1000 / month for most categories.   Beware!

A site which maybe charges a one time admin fee of $500 or less is reasonable and acceptable.  After all it does take time and energy for them to call clients, and investigate to find out if a firm is really successful in bringing results.    Ongoing fees, and very exorbitant high fees are a clear sign of a SCAM.

What about review sites that don't charge ANY fees?

Ahh now these are another breed of scam sites.   Typically these sites are run by "anonymous" operators and do not have any visible phone numbers of contact information.

You will notice typically that such sites are also adorned with BANNER ads on them.

Usually the sites are providing very negative reviews of companies.   They may sprinkle a few positive reviews here and there to make the site seem legitimate, but don't be fooled --->  these sites serve one purpose and one purpose only :  to Generate BANNER AD REVENUE by stealing traffic from other company's BRANDS and funneling that traffic to their sites.  

These sites owners know one thing:   GOOGLE loves review sites.   And they especially love NEGATIVE review sites like RipoffReport.     Therefore they prey on company brand equity and use it to generate TRAFFIC to their site.


What's a good trustworthy site for reviews of SEO companies?    We know of a few.   One of them is www.topreviewstoday.net   .   NOT because they have rated Mindshark very highly, but because they have done so independantly and without charging fees for it.

Make sure you know the context of what you read online.  The internet is still in early stages, and many unethical review sites are still making a huge profit by pumping out biased information to serve their own purposes.

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