Anyone dealt with a company/service like this yet?

[freerunr]

One of our clients received an email from [a company]. The pitch is to introduce a "new and exclusive marketing technology" that allows a business to be one of the terms in autocomplete for a certain "keyword" (whatever that term means anymore) in the business' area. The homepage of their site has a demo video with more info.

I'm very curious what this "technology" involves. Oh, and it takes 60-90 days to be "fully operational" on Google. And the results are guaranteed. Seems legit, right?


Based on Google's Help file on autocomplete, search predictions come from terms a person is typing, the person's search history, and trends from other people's searches. I'm sure a great PR campaign (or a PR nightmare!) could actually lead to inclusion in autocomplete for certain "keywords" (again, I don't even like that word ), but any ideas as to what this "technology" could be besides a bunch of people performing a TON of certain searches to get desired results? I'm asking out of curiosity, not because we're going to recommend they use this service.

 

[amerios]

Anyone Interacted with them yet?

Not here, if fact, never heard of such, I would like to know. My best guess is something like a paid ad in google where they would " auto suggest. " and place the ad. Over all, for now seems like a black hat strategy.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Re: Anyone Interacted with them yet?

Could do something with Mechanical Turk and the like where they pay people to search the keyword and then search the business's name.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Re: Anyone Interacted with them yet?

I've run into this before. Definitely not okay according to Google's guidelines but if they're okay with going down the black-hat SEO road, this is an interesting article on some of the tactics used: Using Autocomplete To Hijack Local Search Results Improve Online Reputation - Search Engine Land

 

[freerunr]

That's what I was thinking, Joshua.

And Joy, that's what I was looking for! You know how clients like to see things in writing