iWebtrack…a belated Christmas story.

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.

One Response to “iWebtrack…a belated Christmas story.”

The Critical Badger Says:
July 23rd, 2009 at 3:52 am
I have had the EXACT same problem. My credit card company challenged their charge and I won. No more fees. However, I contacted Iwebtrack numberous times to no avail. If anyone has this issue, please shoot me an email: criticalbadger@gmail.com so we can talk.

Thanks.

Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige