Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

iWebtrack.  Bad company or bad people?

After my last installment lashing out at iWebtrack for never responding to my many requests for an explanation for their continued charges after obviously opting out of their free trial, I thought I would register for another trial account just to see if customer service was in a coma or not.

So on December 30th I whipped up a freebie account and filled out a form.  I received an immediate response email and then sat and did nothing.  A week later I went back to check the account.  I wasn’t expecting much, but much like Ralphie in a Christmas story, my Red Rider BB Gun had arrived!

I'm going to shoot my eye out!

My pal Garrett, whom I had left a couple voicemails for at his direct extension had finally acknowledged my existence!  Apparently the allure of erroneously charging someone’s credit card again was just too tempting!

No secret decoder ring needed!

Thanks Garrett!  I’ll get right on that trial activation!  Can’t wait to get started…or wait, has it ended yet?

In other actions of questionable web analytics ethics, I dug up this doozy which I can’t believe I failed to find before now…

A poster by the name of Quazar on the Webmaster world forum originally posted this item here, so all credit is due to him, but I felt compelled to repost:

I was curious if anyone else has noticed this. I have been using iwebtrack.com for years and for the first time I noticed that they have placed an invisible hyperlink in the javascript tracking code. This has nothing to do with tracking visitors and everything to do with SEO.

<NOSCRIPT>
<img alt=”iWebTrack” border=”0″ width=”0″ height=”0″ src=”http://stats.iwebtrack.com/nTrack.asp?id=#*$!xx&java=no”>
<a href=”http://www.iwebtrack.com“>web analytics</a>
</NOSCRIPT>

This has created over 82,000 backlinks according to MSN and given them a PR8 with Google. Some sites have literally placed thousands of free links to iwebtrack.com on their site without even knowing it. I guess my biggest concern without getting into the “ethics” is what kind of effect this could have or has already had on the sites that pay them for their services. From my understanding this is in violation of Google, MSN and Yahoos quality guidelines. Who is to say that one of the major search engines won’t come out with a filter that could pick this up as spam? If one of them did anyone using their tracking services could potentially be jeopardizing their current rankings. I would also suspect this could be effecting their customers search positions right now (off theme outbound linking, Page Rank Bleeding, KWD, ect).

I decided to remove the link from the code on all of my sites that I use iwebtrack.com for tracking and thought I would pass this along to others that use their service. All you need to do is remove the <a href=”http://www.iwebtrack.com“>web analytics</a> from the <NOSCRIPT> portion of the code.

Would love to know what others in the forum think.

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So there you have it.  I would once again encourage anyone to stay away from this company, as once again, there are FAR BETTER WEB ANALYTICS OPTIONS AVAILABLE.

End rant…for now.

I was bumming around blogs the other night and something dawned on me as I read through a blog of a self employed SEO who had blogged quite prolifically and had some solid content and good ideas. The guy wasn’t going anywhere, and wouldn’t be going anywhere because his grammar was shaky and spelling errors abounded.

Now, I completely understand a few errors here and there, it’s not like we’re publishing academic journals with everything we write, but a general level of competence with the language is to be expected. SEOs constantly tout that what’s good for the reader is good for the search engine, and this holds true here as well. As I read through this specific blog’s content, I thought to myself, “I should add this to my blog roll.” As I went to do it, I began thinking how it might reflect on me if I linked to the content. I mulled it over for a few moments and ultimately decided against it.

The PR of that site currently sits at n/a, and I’m sure some PR3 link juice from my blog wouldn’t have hurt in that regard. It definitely pays to be meticulous in your use of grammar, as it reflects on your professionalism and the credibility. As important, is that it reflects on those who would link to you. Don’t let grammar errors and spelling scare away would be linkers.