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The staff and your friends at ReputationArmor.com would like to wish you all a happy thanksgiving weekend and a happy holiday season. We are thankful for all of our clients, associates, and friends that have helped ReputationArmor.com grow.
Have a safe holiday and remember do not drink and drive!
Recently our company ReputationArmor.com has received several calls from businesses that have ALL had very similar and alarming experiences with Yelp.com. I used to like to read yelp and the reviews on their site based of the fact that they showed good, fair, and poor reviews about a company and Yelp seemed not to be concerned with the ratio of good vs poor reviews.
As of recently I feel that Yelp MIGHT be doing something a little fishy behind the scenes. 9 out of 10 businesses that contacted us claimed that Yelp.com removed positive reviews about them from their Yelp account. The businesses also claimed that yelp is not allowing new positive reviews to be published or approved when submitted. One dental company claims that they had a client leave them positive feedback and the feedback never showed up on Yelp. The company them mentioned this to their loyal client base and others tried to leave them reviews that never showed up. Other companies are claiming that this is happening to them as well.
Some even claim that yelp is using these tactics in order to force them in to a paid account or advertising account with yelp. There is a great article that talks about the Yelp Sponsorship program located at: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus11
Yelp is an online business directory that allows user and consumer reviews of businesses that have a listing on their directory. Sometimes negative Yelp reviews and complaints can appear high on Google for your business name. Yelp rarely will remove complaints from their site. The only way to manage a negative Yelp review or complaint is with online reputation management. Online reputation management is the process of removing complaints from the top of search results and normally the top of Google. Google seems to like to show negative complaints and reviews high within their results for business.
Reputation Armor can help you remove yelp.com reviews from Google!
CompanyNameSucks.com is a review site that does not require a name, email or registration to file a complaint or write a business review. CompanyNameSucks is starting to show up very well on Google and other search engines. If you find yourself listed on CompanyNameSucks.com, you will most likely notice that the complaint about your company ranks very well on Google when people search your name.
CompanyNameSucks.com is a newer online complaint site and is making it’s way up the ladder as a very problematic website for some businesses and reputations. Keep your eye on this site and if you find yourself listed on CompanyNameSucks.com we can help you. ReputationArmor.com can help repair your online reputation and help you deal with websites like CompanyNameSucks.com
Remove Rip Off Reports With Reputation Armor
Rip Off Report is a very popular online complaint portal that allows users to submit anonymous online complaints about business and individuals. Rip Off Reports rank very high on Google for whatever name the complaint is against. This causes an online reputation nightmare for anyone that gets a rip off report filed against them. The website ripoffreport(dotcom) is very difficult to work with in terms of getting a complaint taken off of their website, it is basically impossible to make or force them to take the complaint down. The website even states that it is their policy never to remove a rip off report complaint even if the original author requests it to be removed.
To make matters worse, rip off report allows people to say pretty much whatever they want about a business or person on their site. Anyone can file a “report” and say virtually anything about you regardless of the merit or validity of the claim (many companies have things posted like “The CEO is a pedophile”). Rip off report has purportedly been sued on many occasions but they are protected under the Communications Decency Act, which basically says that you can be aware of bad content online, do nothing about it, and still not be libel for it. Since rip off report is user generated content and rip off report is not the one actually writing the content, they can’t be held libel.
ReputationArmor.com can help you remove rip off reports from the top of Google’s search results. Reclaim your online reputation with a full scale reputation management campaign. Call: 888-358-2766
Facebook won a victory for social-networking users everywhere. The U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., awarded Facebook $711 million in damages against Sanford Wallace, aka the spam king.
Facebook said Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw broke the law by sending unwanted messages and wall posts to people on Facebook, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Anti-Phishing Act, and the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).
“While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals,” said Sam O’Rourke, general counsel on the Facebook legal team. “Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. attorney’s office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time. This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”
Not the First Time
Wallace is the self-proclaimed spam king — and it’s not the first time he has targeted social-networking sites. In 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace in what was then thought to be the largest-ever spam case. Wallace and Walter Rines organized a phishing scam that harvested MySpace usernames and passwords and blasted out hundreds of thousands of messages for pornography and gambling sites.
“What is shocking to me was that Wallace has already been sued by MySpace previously. So it’s great to see the justice system trying to remove the temptation for people to spam social networks — but evidently, it’s worth the risk,” said Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis. “Obviously since Wallace has done it before and is willing to take the risk of doing it elsewhere, it’s a very lucrative practice to phish and spam people.”
This also isn’t the first time Facebook has gone to court to battle spam. Last November, Facebook won its first victory against spammers in the form of an $873 judgment against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital for sending unwanted messages to people on Facebook. This was the largest judgment ever for an action brought under CAN-SPAM.
Recent surveys of online Internet users shows the amount of time people spend on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is growing, and it may be costing employers time and money.
In the U.S., 77 percent of workers who have a Facebook account say they check their updates at work.
In the United Kingdom, a similar survey of workers shows 57 percent regularly log on to social networks, resulting in 40 minutes of lost worker productivity per day.
Studies show the amount of time people spend on social networking and blogging sites has tripled since last year. Employers are fighting back. A recent survey shows 54 percent of U.S. companies have already banned social networking and blogging while on the job.
Read The Rest Of This Story: Here