Forget about the endless rain, there is actually something different happening in Washington state. The State Attorney General’s office is suing Visible.net and Captures.com for false claims of results and poor customer service, among many other things.

Now you might think it odd, but I’m not surprised to see this sort of suit. The SEM industry is tainted by companies not delivering on the claims they make. If a company promises something it can’t deliver, the appropriate steps should be taken. In this particular situation the legal system will decide if that has occurred.

Some of the charges include:

• Misrepresentation – extremely tricky for SEMs since we are not the search engines, and accurately setting expectations about performance upfront with clients is difficult but critical
• Failure to deliver
• Unauthorized charges
• Poor customer service
• Various telephone solicitation charges

Visible.net, who also operates under the name WebMarketingSource.com, provides a variety of online marketing services, including a platform for eCommerce sites, SEO and website design. In just 3 years, the Better Business Bureau has received over 90 complaints about this company alone.

There are quite a few references to consumer protection throughout the lawsuit itself, and even more information about consumer protection on the WA state legislature site.

Visible has posted a response to the lawsuit on their blog, which counteracts the allegations. They claim to have many satisfied customers ready to discuss the situation with the AG office.

The state is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices.

One little known, yet potentially salient fact about Google AdWords and bidding on trademarked terms, is that it’s not always the advertiser that chooses to bid on the trademark. We have seen cases where, depending on the match type chosen (and, perhaps, depending on how much money Google’s Algorithm predicts it can make for Google), Google will display our client’s ads on competitor marks. Though these key phrases were not things we wanted to be seen on, as we knew they had poor conversion metrics, Google would show our client’s ad on their competitor’s names. To stop this behavior we had to specifically add negative keywords.

The interesting question raised by this is that it removes (in my mind, at least) the validity of an ISP-like claim for Google on trademark bidding (e.g. it wasn’t us, it was our advertisers, we just host the stuff). There are cases where Google makes the choice, not the advertiser, to show these potentially trademark-infringing advertisements.

I’m not sure if this is public knowledge, and I haven’t seen this mentioned in any of the cases to-date. Thus far, Google has won most of these legal actions in the U.S. (with an adverse ruling in the New Jersey area), and has lost cases on this in France, but none of the rulings has yet risen to the appellate level. The newest plaintiff, American Airlines has pockets deep enough to pursue this all the way up to the Supremes, if they so choose, as does Google.

Microsoft has always been known as a follower. Rarely do they innovate; their efforts are at best an evolutionary step on someone else’s work. And they never follow quickly.

Until now.

Slightly more than a month after Google purchases DoubleClick for about three billion dollars, MSN copies the action by purchasing Aquantive. That’s pretty quick to put together a six billion dollar deal. One has to wonder how well they thought things through.

You have to give MSN credit, however; they didn’t let Google beat them in overpaying for an acquisition…

Google was soundly, and correctly, criticized for purchasing a search engine marketing agency (Performics, a division of DoubleClick). The outcry on Microsoft doing the same thing (AR Search is a division of Aquantive) has been surprisingly muted. Danny Sullivan compared this to a newspaper publisher purchasing a public relations firm. A conflict of interest is created between the paper, who is supposed to provide accurate and unbiased news, and the PR firm, whose entire purpose is spinning the news for its clients.

This is a solid analogy to a search engine owning a search engine marketing firm.

Google goes so far as to warn webmasters to “Beware of SEOs that … allege a “special relationship” with Google”. Does this include Performics? Google doesn’t say.

The simple reality is this: Google and MSN must divest themselves of the SEM firms they bought, or risk greatly damaging the industry’s trust.

I guess I’ll be nice and not reveal the name of the firm, but I just returned a voicemail from a gentleman named Paul at an SEO firm. He said that he had just been on my website and noticed that we were doing some paid search advertising.

According to Paul, it’s very difficult to generate significant traffic with paid search, and we should consider natural search. Of course, his firm would be happy to help. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been so much fun, but I really enjoyed pointing out that he obviously had not been to our site, as we are a search engine marketing firm ourselves.

I must say, however, that the keyword repetition at the bottom of his company’s homepage is quite impressive, however. For a second, I thought I had been taken back in time to SEO circa 1998.

SEO Book
Due to a lack of response by Traffic Power to the judge’s jurisdictional dismissal, the case apprears to be over. Congrats, Aaron!

Aaron also links to this Authoritative Guide to Unethical SEO Business Practices, a motion for summary judgement in another Traffic Power case.

Leann Pass
Leann reports on a firm, ParamountWebMasters, that cold called one of her clients. The firm claimed that the client’s site was engaging in dangerous SEO practices, and was about to be banned by Google.

Leann’s reputation in the industry is of squeeky clean search engine optimization, the client knew this, and told the firm “no thanks.” The firm then threatened to turn the client’s site into Google.

I don’t even know where to begin with this.

There are unfortunately a huge number of “firms” that engage in this sort of behavior, and it gives us all a bad name.

Search engine marketing is the hottest area in marketing right now. One can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an SEO article in the mainstream media right now. As a result, the con artists are coming out of the woodwork.

I’m really not sure how we do so, but the SEM industry needs to find a way to police itself on this front. As SearchRank suggests, the first step is to shine a light on anyone engaging in such practices.

SEO Book
I didn’t see this when I wrote the previous article, but Aaron has scored a major legal victory. A judge has thrown out the Traffic Power case on grounds of personal jurisdiction. Traffic Power has thirty days to request leave to ammend the complaint and fix the jurisdictional issues, but I would not be surprised if they just let it go at this point.

The judge declined to rule on Aaron’s request of summary judgement, as they are not currently hearing the case on the jurisdictional grounds.

Congrats, Aaron! Maybe this will soon be over.

SEO Book
Round One to Aaron.

As many of you know, Aaron Wall, creator of SEO Book has been involved in a legal fight with Traffic Power. Aaron posted on his site his opinion on the quality of Traffic Power’s service (technically, on the lack of quality). Now, it happens that Aaron’s opinion on Traffic Power matches that of most people in the know.

So, Traffic Power sued Aaron for the comments.

Well, a few days ago, Google engineer Matt Cutts makes a Google-approved post on his blog stating that Traffic Power and its clients received a penalty from Google. In fact, Cutts says, “Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines”.

That should help Aaron out in the lawsuit…