FAQ: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Is the Keyword Property Center Spam Driving You Nuts?

September 2003 Update: We received a phone call from Richard Goodale about our article listed below in which he asked to clarify a few things (to put it lightly). Let's clarify a few things in the article posted below:

1. Mr. Goodale acknowledge that his company uses OPT-OUT marketing. This means he'll send you emails you didn't request but honors unsubscribe requests. Personally, we call this type of marketing spam. It's well known that some spammers actually send spam with the one motive of finding out whether your email is indeed active, and do this by sending you ridiculous requests so you'll unsubscribe - thus proving your email is used. This makes opt-out marketing an extremely difficult situation for web users to deal with because they don't know whether unsubscribing will lead to even more emails in their inbox.

2. Mr. Goodale thought the references to published spam complaints about his business were unfair since even legitimate businesses are often the victims of spam complaints. It is certainly true that legitimate companies are wrongly accused of spam because people often forget they signed up for a list, or didn't realize they were opening themselves up to receiving emails from 3rd parties when they subscribed to a site. We've also noticed this with the spam software we run. Our spam software, Spamnet by Cloudmark, partly decides what's spam based on how many users of their software have labeled an email spam. We've seen cases where legitimate and clearly opt-in emails have been marked as spam including emails from high volume emailers including carlsontravel.com and highrankings.com. However, if you check the number of complaints (carlsontravel [0], highrankings [0], edirectadvertising [107]) about those two businesses vs. edirectadvertising, you'll find a disproportionate number of edirectadvertising complaints.

3. The business of Keyword Ownership is a bit more complex than originally stated. While AOL is the main provider of this type of service, there are companies who offer a service where they direct traffic to your web site based on keywords typed into the address bar in Internet Explorer. In discussions with vendors of this type of service, it appears this service is dependent on web users installing a browser plug-in. This rarely happens by choice, so to improve the odds of users doing this, some of the companies offering this service have partnered with freeware companies like Kazaa to have their plug-in piggyback on their installations.

We hope this clarifies things.

-Ed Kohler

Have you ever received an email from Keyword Property Center? If you have a website and an email address you probably have. Are you curious to know whether their service is legit? We hope this article helps outline the value of their service:

2. Before he started spamming under the edirectadvertising.com domain name, he used the above riceez.com domain which ended up on anti-spam lists such as this one:

3. There is no such thing as "Keyword Ownership" on the web. Search engines read and rank web pages based on their unique search engine algorithms which are not influenced by payments.

4. AOL Keywords are only used within the AOL network are are sold by AOL and AOL only.

5. Pay Per Click advertising is purchased through sites such as Overture.com or Google - not through companies who send spam emails.

6. Google is the most important search engine to submit your site to and you don't need to pay anyone to do that (just click here and fill out the two line form). Search engine optimization professionals do not charge for this. Their services are for achieving high rankings on relevant search terms for your business.

7. If their service was truly legitimate, wouldn't they simply purchase all of the keywords relevant to their business and have all the business they could handle rather than spamming you?

8. Notice that every reference to "Keyword Property Center" in Google's discussion groups is within the Spam Sightings category?

9. And the same can be said for all references to edirectadvertising:

10. And never trust a company that doesn't place a physical address or phone number on their web site.

We hope this clarifies the value of that service.

Ed Kohler is the president and founder of Haystack In A Needle - a full service web marketing and search engine positioning firm based in Minneapolis, MN. Ed has a rule set up in his email program to filter Keyword Property Center emails directly to the trash.

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