Yelp is Useless and their Review Filters Stink

When I opened Custom Framing To You, I knew I needed to find a knowledgeable company to help provide me with a total online marketing solution.  After looking at several highly qualified options, I chose HTP Company because they were able to provide my company with a complete array of online services such as Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Web Hosting, Programming, and Web Site Metrics.  HTP Company's expert staff took time to explain all of my options, and they delivered an excellent web site design to me in a very short time.  I am also very satisfied with the on-going support provided by HTP Company, and I highly recommend them.  If you want to be noticed on the web, you will consult with HTP Company and give them the opportunity to show you their proven results.  I believe that hiring HTP Company was one of the best business decisions I've ever made.  Over 90% of my new business finds me through my website created, optimized, and hosted by HTP Company.

Yelp keeps deleting our clients valid and truthful reviews, see above.

 

You can not email and even complain to Yelp.

Why is Google giving so much authority to a web site (Yelp) that is so useless and defective? 

"Big Brother" Yelp does not even email you if they decide your review is fake, and they remove your review with no warning whatsoever. 
I wish I could remove Yelp from Google just as easily.

This is what the Yelp web site says about their broken review filter:
The filter continually reevaluates its decisions based on the information at hand. As a result, it's fairly common to see reviews come and go as the filter picks up new information. Either way, business owners should probably focus less on any one review and more on their entire body of reviews. Reviewers, in turn, should contribute to the site and give the filter a chance to get to know them over the long-term.

I have been doing a survey of what users of Yelp think about Yelp's arrogant, ignorant and assinine policies like above.
Most people feel the same as I do, Yelp should not use defective review filters that do not work, and many people like me are just boycotting and not even using Yelp any longer because you can not trust Yelp and they treat their users poorly.  I mean who would want to write reviews on Yelp just to have Yelp's crappy review filter delete what they write?

The following is an article by Forbes from last year, this shows this problem with Yelp has been going for a long time, and Yelp is doing nothing to respond.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2012/08/16/think-yelp-is-unbiased-think-again/


More terrible reviews of Yelp, please click on the image below:

SEO-Process-Overview

SEO Process Overview - This is an ongoing continuing process that we do every day for our clients.  It is very important to stay with SEO methodologies long term in order to achieve the desired results.  If you stop this process your web traffic and rankings will drop and Google may penalize you.
Google is very complex and secret so no one can claim to be 100% accurate as to why Google makes the decisions it does.  However we do know that Google has many different types of penalties some of which are manual and some of which are automated via advanced software algorithms.
The quality of your backlinks and the longer your backlinks are aged, make up major factors in the Google software ranking algorithms.  Please remember if you lose important authoritative backlinks, then you must start the aging process over from the starting line.  Besides losing PageRank, this also brings suspicion from Google, and you do not want that to happen.  Google detects all these changes looking for unnatural suspicious activities.

I have been doing some new testing on Google.  The changes made to a web page are indexed and applied to Google search results days in advance of what Google shows when you use the "show Google cache command".  So the freshest indexed data is first applied to Google search results, then days later Google updates what they show as cached.  This makes sense as it is more important to Google to use the freshly indexed data then to report and update the data Google has stored about a web page.  For example the newest article I have written in this blog is showing up in the Google search results five days ago.  However when I look at the Google cache for this blog, it still does not show that Google even knows about the newest article.

The following are two good videos from Matt Cutts of Google that you should watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-UR7NETxrk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg&feature=player_embedded

Charles-Carreon-Internet-Lawyer

Disclaimer:
Tim Cushing of Techdirt.com has written an article about my write up below, Tim seems to think Charles Carreon is paying me money to write this article.  The exact opposite is true, I hire and pay Charles Carreon to do legal work for me and Charles Carreon does not pay me any money whatsoever.  In fact if Tim Cushing would like to do another article, I will be happy to show him the canceled checks proving that I hire and pay Charles Carreon for his legal services.

This article is about the importance of having a great Internet attorney.
I have one, and he is my friend and an outstanding Internet attorney that has done wonderful work that protects me and helps me grow our business.  His name is Charles Carreon, and I highly recommend him based on the merit of his excellent work.

He has strong expertise in:
Trademarks
Domain Investors
Application Developers

I own many hundreds of domains and web sites and software that my development teams have developed over the years.  This all must be legally protected and each web site that is important should obtain a Federal Trademark.  I really do not like to write about law except from my own experiences and from the perspective of a businessman and entrepreneur that hires attorney's to do work on these types of projects.
Many Internet entrepreneurs resist the proper legal procedures to register Trademarks, file Patents for their software, properly protect expensive domain names, set up Corporations or LLC's, etc.

I can tell you from personal legal experience and several law suits I have had to file, that this is a "Pay me a smaller amount now, or Pay a big old bag of money later" proposition.
We know you think you are saving money by not hiring a lawyer to take care of this, then years later when you are in a law suit you wish you would have listened to previous good legal advice and properly protected your Internet and software assets.

This is also true for software developers who should hire a good Internet / Software attorney to draw up proper legal license agreements.
You want and need an attorney that has many years of strong experience doing this, and Charles Carreon is this type of attorney.
I would recommend against giving any perpetual software license agreements, it is wiser to license your software by the year, or at the longest, a five year software license.

Today a hot topic of law and SEO is the strange and difficult issue of reputation management.  How do we know what to believe on the Internet when we have sites like RipoffReport and Yelp, etc.

Please read this interesting article from NPR.org on this topic.
The debate over anonymous comments has been building in newsrooms for a decade. Old-school journalists argue the optimistic predictions of Internet comment boards brimming with the wisdom of the crowd haven't panned out. Instead, they say, news organizations tarnish their reputations by hosting comments that are often snarky and factually inaccurate.
More major news papers are saying no to anonymous comments on the Internet.
Interesting video of an Internet troll confronted and interviewed. 
These evil trolls use names like "Anonymous Coward", etc. then it is very difficult to track them down to take legal actions against them. 

I have talked and emailed with Ed the owner of RipoffReport, and even though his believes and morals on this topic are different then mine.  Frankly Ed's position (the owner of RipoffReport) upsets me because there are many more cases of false, negative attacks, then grandmothers wanting to comment anonymously because they are afraid some big company might file a law suit against them.  I guess it is at least 10 negative and false to 1 true concern about facing legal action by a big business, perhaps worse because of the huge increase of negative SEO methods in the last few years. 
Ed of Ripoff Report is a very clever guy with a good team of attorneys that fight everyone as long and as hard as they can so he does not give out any information about who files the reports.  This is where you need a good attorney if a lot of money is on the line and you need to legally force RipoffReport to disclose information about who really wrote the complaint(s).  It will cost you at least $20,000 and most likely much more to prove who wrote something negative and false about your company, and then to take them to Court and collect will cost even more money, at least $50,000.  So this is not an inexpensive endeavor, it is less expensive to hire a good SEO company to push down the negative and perhaps false articles and complaints. This can also work the other way, you can push up negative complaint articles about your competitors if you so desire.  I am linking to a good article that describes the various options, however I do not agree with SearchEngineLand about option #4 on his list.  Yes SEO does require ongoing continuous work, however it is not short lived if done properly.  If fact Search Engine Optimization is the best and least expensive of the six options presented in his article.  Furthermore if you Google this attorney's name, Kenton Hutcherson who wrote this article for SearchEngineLand, you will see a RipoffReport showing as #1 in Google for his name, which proves he would be wise to hire a good SEO company to push down the RipOffReport that shows up #1 on Google when you do a search for his name. 

Like I said, Ed the owner of RipoffReport has a good team of attorneys to fight anyone.  For the record I am against RipoffReport and if Google completely deleted RipoffReport and other sites like it from the Internet it would be Google's freedom of speech right and a good thing as far as I am concerned.  I do not like how RipoffReport can publish false complaints and they do not care.  Just because it is legal and they have good lawyers does not make it right.

Why Website Owners Should be Very Angry at Google

I am going to work on this article some more when I have a chance.
A SEO expert friend of mine sent me a fantastic article about trying to recover from Google penalties today.

http://www.garyviray.com/google-penalty.html

This is the best Google penalty and recovery story I have read to date, and it is full of excellent information and useful links.

I do not understand why web site owners are not so angry at Google that they are not trying to start some protest activies against Google.
This article by Gary Viray proves how easy it is to sabotage a competitors rankings on Google, and Google is in total denial about this huge SEO Sabotage problem.

I have talked and emailed with many web site owners who are victims of SEO Sabotage. Please understand that this can happen to anyone, all that has to occur is a competitor of yours hires a company like this:

http://www.negativeseo.biz


Below is what a positive penalty removal looks like from Google.  Meaning after you complete the massive amount of work that Google is requiring and submit one or more Reconsideration Requests.


Below is a message sent out by Google.  This means Google is taking the penalty off of your web site.

80% of Web Site Owners are Wrong about SEO and Link Building

We receive thousands of phone calls and emails every year, about SEO and Link Building. Eighty percent or more of the people contacting us have terribly Wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples, and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Hopefully, you will find useful SEO information that will help your company grow and increase your profits.

Many people phone our company saying, " I need low cost SEO, low quality backlinks, and tons of cheap links. "

I respond, "Why?".... They say, "I want to out rank my competitors."
They think it is a pure numbers game. All links are equal and you get more and you win.

They want fast outstanding results, they want to be #1 for competitive keyword phrases in 1-5 months.

I reply,  "You do not understand how search engine optimization works, you need to look at this as a long term investment that you will be making as long as you are in business.  Good ranking results take at least 6-12 months to achieve.  Highly competitive keywords may take several years of SEO work and high quality merit based link building.  Then you have to maintain all this work forever or you will lose the top rankings you worked so hard to achieve.  Please remember your competitors are also working hard on their SEO and want to outrank you."

More on Link Building
Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. Google now gives thousands of web site owners penalties for these low quality backlinks.
Unfortunately Google also has penalized many websites unfairly. 
Your competitors can have your web site sabotaged via black hat SEO experts.

This includes all the webmasters that do article submission SPAM (duplicate content SPAM), excessive and only low quality link exchanges, these do not work because Google considers that all junk and SPAM. E.g. A PR0 site exchanging links with other PR0 sites, to Google this is just junk to junk SPAMMY stupid SEO methods.
Please watch this video by Matt Cutts of Google:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

Google turned Internet business owners on their heads in 2012, and really turned the screws on low quality SEO businesses, however they also increased the importance of sites that have higher editorial standards.
Also it is more important than ever to keep high quality long (many years) aged backlinks. If you lose our well-aged backlinks Google can really punish you and drop your rankings significantly and even worse you cannot replace these long aged backlinks, and you have to start all over again from the beginning.

Please click and read Matt Cutt's slides below, this verifies what I am stating above.  Matt is a senior Google employee.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

I have a tendency to give clients/prospects/employees/family the keen truth.  I know and fully understand this about myself and I accept who I am.
So below is some more truth about SEO.

Search engine optimization is not something you can turn on and off without Google not liking it.

Google sees all these SEO improvements we have done for you and when they see this stopping and going away Google marks your site as a "Devious website" that Google should not trust (suspicious unnatural activities) , and may filter and penalize you.
Then website owners hire a new SEO Company and this makes it even worse.  E.g. Google sees: up, down, up, down ... all these changes, unnatural activities, and lack of stability is detected by Google.  This is not our fault, as we cannot continue doing work for you for free.  This is a bad consequence of not staying with SEO long term.  Web site owners should choose one SEO Company and stay with them for many years to achieve the best results.

We see this over and over again and we warn clients that they are harming themselves with Google perhaps long term if they do not have a long term commitment to SEO .

Once Google marks your web site as a "Devious website" it is very difficult to recover, some web site owners never recover from this mistake of thinking you can turn SEO on and off without any negative consequences.

I have many people who phone me 1-2 years after I talk with them and say:

"Tom I wish I would have listened and followed your advice, and since I did not follow your SEO advice I have had terrible results."

Based on my results I am one of the top SEO experts in the world. I am also modest (lol), my resume is below.

http://www.htpcompany.com/gototom_tom_forrest.htm

It is funny to me that people hire us as SEO experts and then do not follow our advice. I feel like saying to them, why did you hire our company if you already know more about Search Engine Optimization than we do?
I will not even respect any other SEO expert unless they can prove to me that they have achieved top rankings for many years for tough competitive keyword phrases.  I often tell people that claim they are SEO experts to show me proof of their outstanding results.  Most people have no proof of any top ranking results on Google.

One of the most important reasons I have had such outstanding long term success for our clients is that I am a long term thinker.  We follow all Google guidelines and have had the same merit based backlinks in place for our clients for over ten years.  Google loves this.

Google SEO Sabotage

By: Tom Forrest
Email: Tom.Forrest@HTPcompany.com

Hello Google Management,  (this is a copy of an email I sent to Google)

Google has created a new industry “SEO Sabotage”, I have seen several cases of this and it is easy to do.  You can now easily have your competitors penalized by Google and your competitors can also easily have you penalized by using bad link building methods and procedures that Google does not like.

This article is one of many real life examples.

http://blog.kevinfream.com/2012/09/01/seo-sabotage
Another good SEO Sabotage article to read.  
http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo
The author (Aaron Wall) is one of the best SEO experts in the world.  Many people are SEO pretenders and do not know what they are talking about.
I just found another good SEO Sabotage example and even though I do not know the author, when I read his article I can tell that he is an excellent SEO expert.
http://www.itstheroi.com/google/google-fail-victim-of-negative-seo-still-suffering 

This is Google's latest Disavow information:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

This SEO Sabotage problem is not going away, it is becoming huge and many people are very angry at Google because of this terrible new Google policy that started in 2012.
Please look at what this web site is selling:
http://www.negativeseo.biz

It is common sense… webmasters can control who they link to, they can Not control who links to them.  There is no way around this basic fact and now it is leaking out and many people email my company asking if we can sabotage their competitors with “Bad Backlinks” that Google does not like.

Furthermore you are penalizing way too many innocent webmasters.

Just Google “Google SEO Sabotage”  there are many interesting stories to see.

I am just trying to help Google. This is the Worst problem Google has created in over five years.
I own Google stock, and as a long term shareholder I am very unhappy and many people knowledgeable about SEO are very unhappy and upset with Google over this ridiculous policy of penalizing web sites for something out of their control, and now the huge increase of SEO sabotage Google has caused.

Thank you in advance for your consideration on this issue.

Warning Google Continues to Penalize Innocent Web Sites

This article updated again 2-4-12
Google fixed the unfair penalty on www.ichatdev.com
So it took Google 2.5 years to fix this Google Mistake.

Unfortunately after 2.5 years Google has never stopped this site from selling graphic "Sponsored" links that pass PageRank. So if you buy PageRank from this site, it works just fine and apparently Google does not care.
What else can we think if Google has ignored this for 2.5 years now.
http://www.webaward.org

I originally wrote this article on 9-24-09.
This article has been updated on 10-2-10.

Of the five Google mistakes that I detail below, Google has only fixed one or 20% of them in over twelve months. Also evil Spammers have been reported to Google several times and Google has not done anything to stop them.I really wish I did not have to write this article. I have been a Google shareholder (stockholder) since Google first went public and I have been a paying Google customer since Google first started. My hope is that someone at Google will help fix the terrible problem of penalizing innocent sites by Google very quickly and that I can edit this article to be more positive about Google.

First I want to state that for the last eleven years I have had some problems where Google penalized my sites unfairly and after contacting Google employees and working with them for several weeks those problems were fixed, at least until recently. Now since Google has stepped up its efforts to penalize sites selling paid links Google has created a horrible problem of penalizing many innocent web sites. Please read the following detailed examples below, these are just a few of many examples I can show you.

Back in 2003 we put up some merit based outbound links on a few internal pages and there was no problem from Google until 2009. Then both of these web sites were incorrectly and unfairly penalized by Google. At first I had no idea what caused this penalty which in itself is a major problem, Google should at least let you know why they are penalizing your web site. Then after contacting Google employees I was questioned in detail about the links on these two pages from 2003, in fact if I wanted Google to take these incorrect and unfair penalties off of my sites I would need to delete these non paid links that have been on these pages since 2003. Of course this made me very unhappy and frankly angry at Google. However I did it because I do not want Google to penalize my web sites. I wish Google would stop saying "you can do whatever you want on your web site and we can do whatever we want with our search engine". This statement just upsets most webmasters as it is like a Big Bully talking to you, who wants Google to penalize their web site especially when you have done nothing wrong in the first place.

I am afraid to write this article because I think Google may unfairly penalize me even more for writing this article. Unfortunately many webmasters that I talk with feel exactly the same as I do; we do not trust Google is going to treat us fairly, as my mother always says "actions speak louder than words". So Google can tell us as much as they want that they are not profiling SEO people, however the facts indicate that Google is profiling SEO experts. This is why so many articles are being written about SEO profiling.

Please read these excellent articles about Google unfairly profiling SEO companies:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-web-spam-team-deriving-value-from-profiling-seo-operators-of-interest

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-profiles-seo-as-criminals/ Excerpts: "Google It’s wrong, you’re a bully and if anyone’s intent needs to be questioned, it’s yours." Google is the face of EVIL.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/google-profiles-seo/

I can see from many years of data that Google does seem to be profiling SEO experts, which is a terrible idea anyway.

I receive emails everyday from super evil people doing all sorts of evil stuff that are against Google guidelines and none of these people are SEO experts. The fact is the most evil people on the Internet are not SEO experts and most of us do a great deal to help Google. I have told many thousands of people not to sell or buy links and not to do all the things Google Guidelines are against, like malware, duplicate content, hidden text links etc. I have also written articles about this that many hundreds of thousands of people read. If anything I feel Google should give me some reward for helping them, not penalizing me incorrectly and unfairly.

Anyway after a few weeks and a lot of effort by me Google did finally take off these unfair penalties partially, meaning they put the PageRank back to where it was however they blocked my sites from passing any link juice to anyone else.

Let's look at how this happened:

Google has created a database of what they think are known link buyers, which is a bad approach that will not work because most people that buy links do not purchase 100% of their backlinks, they also have natural backlinks. So if a site had 70% natural links and 30% paid links just think about how many innocent web sites Google would end up penalizing. So apparently these people that had merit based (non paid) links on our web site decided it was too much work to do link building the Google approved way and then decided to start buying links years after the merit based links were put up on our sites, which is a common practice in our industry. Then Google put them in this "known link buyer database" and the Google software penalized my web sites. So how many people is this happening to? I really do not know the answer to that except to say many people must be penalized unfairly by Google these days, and to add insult to injury, if you are lucky enough to talk to Google about this they treat you like you are guilty until proven innocent. Is this America and is "Big Brother Google" watching everything you do and treating you unfairly becoming a reality?

Why does Google not make a public list of "Bad Sites" they do not want you to link to, then webmasters can check and see if a site is on this list and not link to them. Also these sites that Google does not like and caused the penalty to my sites had PageRank (PR) of PR5, so no one can know that Google does not like them and why do these "Bad Sites" have higher PageRank than I do in the first place?

Google has responded to me regarding making a list of bad sites not to link to and told me:
"We've talked about this, but the issue with publishing lists is that a lot of spammers would receive official notification that they've been caught. Then they'd start over again on a different site, but they'd be even sneakier."

I responded to Google with the following:

"Thank you for responding to me.
What you describe above will happen over time anyway. I understand you would still like to slow the spammers down. The problem is you are harming innocent sites by what you are doing, this in my and many other peoples opinion is just unacceptable. Google should not be penalizing innocent sites just to make it more difficult for the spammers."

I also wonder if the Google legal department does not want them making a public list of "Bad Sites" not to link to. I wish I knew if this was part of the reason also. I have told Google on several occasions all they have to do is tell me they do not like something and I will take it down. This would save all parties a lot of time and effort and as a Google stockholder this would also make me happy not to see so much time wasted on this. There are bigger fish for Google to fry :)

These are reasons why so many people are afraid of Google and do not trust Google. Unfortunately again this story becomes even worse. Now Google has incorrectly and unfairly penalized even more of my web sites and has still not fixed these Google mistakes.

Here is another example:

http://www.picknbuy.com/ Was falsely accused of selling links by Google. It is penalized to PR0 the worst rating Google has. Also when people see that Google has penalized your site you start to lose your backlinks quickly, so this is urgent. This site has never sold any links and does not sell links today, so why would Google penalize it? Google told me it was because of some links they incorrectly thought were paid links on my site and I explained to them they were not paid links, and then Google sent me an email showing me an auction from 2005; yes 2005 before I even owned this site. The auction was for the sale of the site and Google mistakenly thought it was for the sale of paid links. Yes, I became very angry and said how could the smart software engineers at Google be so wrong and make such a horrible mistake and harm me and my web site this way?

Google will never admit any mistakes apparently and now they are just ignoring me completely. This site http://www.picknbuy.com/ is still penalized and Google has not fixed this mistake yet.
Google did take the unfair penalty off of this site on 2-18-10.

Another web site that Google has penalized unfairly is:

http://www.ichatdev.com/

Duplicate Content a very Common Business Owner Mistake

A very common business owner mistake is to accidentally create duplicate content and be penalized by Google.

Many businesses write articles to help promote their business and think that sending that article out and trying to get it published is a good thing. They also put these same article(s) on their web site and do not realize this is against Google Guidelines. It is not easy for business owners to understand all of Google Guidelines, however as the old saying goes "ignorance is no excuse for not following the law".

The following is what I just sent one of my clients about duplicate content.

Google wants each unique article in one place on the Internet. Other wise they will consider it SPAM and will take your site completely out of Google.

This is the case if you have this duplicate content on your site and on others sites at the same time.

Another form of duplicate content SPAM is where the content is not on your site, however is on hundreds of other web pages. Then these sites could be penalized by Google and the links pointing to your site will not be counted as a vote for you by Google. Furthermore if Google saw massive abuse of the same content being placed on many thousands of web sites they may take even more severe actions to penalize the wrong doers.

HTP Company 5 Star Rating

HTP Company

 based on 15 reviews.

This company's business is Search Engine Optimization, Internet Advertising and Consulting Services.

Category:		Internet Search Engine Optimization Services
Address:		30961 Agoura Rd, Suite 215 Westlake Village, CA 91361 (800) 213-8530
Web Site:		http://www.htpcompany.com

Customer Reviews & Ratings

Wes R.       In summer of 2010 I began speaking with HTP Company regarding aSEO campaign. For years our website has struggled to gain a footing on search engines, partly due to a site design flaw and partly due to another SEO company's failure to live up to goals. I was interested to try HTP Company and found many great reviews of their service online. I can report that HTP Company was able to fix the design flaw in our site as well as create a fantastic SEO campaign to help us grow our business.  In a few months our site is now showing up near the top on all major search engines for our keywords. I would definitely recommend hiring HTP Company as they are experts in their field and easy to work with. Posted on 12/20/2012

Mike Georgia       The ranking results from HTP Company are outstanding.  HTP is one of the few company's that I have hired that can handle clients issues properly. They seem to know who I am when I phone them, and they are friendly with me. They understand that their business is technicial and doesn't lend it self to personal relationships, HTP Company really combats that feeling by always knowing who I am and handling any issues in a personal manner, and quickly.  » Bookmark  |  » Send a Message  |  Posted on 12/13/2012 Was this review...? Useful (1) Funny (0) Flag this Review

Everyone at HTP Company has been professional and very knowledgeable. Our website traffic has dramatically and steadily increased since we started working with HTP. I would highly recommend them to any business for SEO. Mich Keller V.P. Sales & Marketing MateStone International, Inc. Posted on 12/2/2012 Useful (2) Funny (0)