Guaranteed SEO & a Yahoo Class Action
We were surprised yesterday to receive a letter entitled “Notice of class Action Settlement. It appears that some time in the past 10 years, (and it will now be nearly 10 years ago) we may have purchased text pay per click advertising on go to.com which then became overture.com and later Yahoo!. A settlement has been entered into by parties in action called “In re Yahoo litigation”. We are informed that a class has been certified in the action and also of the terms of settlement.
We were very puzzled to receive this a class action - taking place against a company we have rarely had any dealings with directly, also in a different country to us, and relating to a time long ago. Nevertheless, there are former Yahoo! (overture etc) pay per click search advertising customers who brought this class action back in 2006, alleging that the “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” products provided by Yahoo! (overture etc) were in breach of contract because adverts were also displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites, sites are available under common misspellings known as “typo squatting” sites amongst other things. This was seen as unfair business practice.
So what has been achieved by this action? Well, Yahoo has agreed to offer a new advert placement option so customers can control where their Yahoo adverts appear. It has also posed enhanced disclosures regarding traffic quality. Yahoo has also agreed to allow advertisers to pose questions or request investigations regarding Yahoo advertising partners. Oh, and if you are now out of business, you have a right to apply to receive $20 from Yahoo!
There is an interesting blog about this written some time ago http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/05/yahoo_syndicati.htm.
Here it is argued by this blog that the actual wording Yahoo! gave regarding their sponsored search product, if read to the letter, was not misleading. Clearly, some customers felt otherwise and in any event, the class action has now reached a proposed settlement, so however valid, this was not dismissed out of hand.
From one point of view, it is good to know that individuals or small firms are able to hold commercial giants to account as this case shows. I have no real knowledge about this case and what specifically was alleged by Yahoo! in their promotional literature. Nevertheless, the flipside is of course that although marketing materials should not missell, they are there to create desire in potential clients. Are there not cases where clients wish to buy something which they see will help solve their issues and read extra into what is stated - or not even read fully the information provided?
To turn this on ourselves as a company, our search engine optimisation page mentions the words “search engine optimisation guarantee”. Guaranteed SEO - now, if you read those words in isolation, what does that mean? Does that mean that in using our service you will be ranked in the Top 10 for your chosen search terms and that is our service, end of story, and anything other than that means we have not provided our service?
Many companies offer guaranteed SEO, so-called. What they mean is different from company to company. In our case, we rely on people reading web pages fully. We rely on clients reading sales proposals fully too. Because what we offer in our particular service is that we will optimise your website with “white hat” on-site and off-site techniques and in the event that the service doesn’t result in top page rankings, you have recourse to money back on your contract. We are at pains to make sure that all our potential customers understand this clearly before sign up. We have an excellent search optimisation service, many top ranking clients and we also want to market this in the best possible light in our literature.
It is good that the Yahoo!s of this world can still be held to account if they are misleading or misselling but equally as a potential client, it is important to ensure the service contracted is fully understood, especially with intangible services such as search engine optimisation.
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