Hi Everyone,

Susan Buchanan wrote:

I bought $300 worth of clicks from Red Zee and the traffic on my website did increase substantially.  However, I did not have my website (and still
don't) optimized to capture leads.  I will consider purchasing from them again once the site is optimized.  I have prospects that came from the
website but I don't know if they came in through the Red Zee program.

In response, Tony Pomykala wrote:

 But unfortunately for them I track my web traffic with my own programs, and I had them driving their directed traffic to a specific landing page that I created to welcome the traffic they sent me.  NEVER once did that traffic ever go past that landing page. EVER. Kind of strange for a real estate website where anyone who comes usually wants to go see the MLS Search page, isn't it??

Tony is absolutely correct! Hang up on them as fast as you can!! They are selling you "smoke and mirrors"!

RedZee had been cold calling real estate agents throughout the Northern Virginia area and when one of my clients signed up with them, we noticed the exact same thing that Tony did. NOT ONCE did any traffic ever go past the Home page of her web site - very strange for a real estate site that has a complete search of the Washington area MLS right from the Home page. So who were these visitors? Obviously no one who was really interested in buying or selling real estate!

I have been working for several years with a wonderful SEO company, Step Forth (www.stepforth.com), with great success for my web clients. So I turned to them to see what was really going on with RedZee. For those who are interested, learn more about RedZee at -http://news.stepforth.com/2006-news/Seeing-Red-Search-Engine-RedZee-reviewed.shtml

Bottom line - there is no "magic bullet" to rising to the top of the search engines. As Ross Dunn, CEO of Step Forth, writes about RedZee and their manipulation of the Top 3 pay-per-click program service, "First, I find it ethically corrupt and astounding that any search engine would misrepresent what are supposed to be organic search results with paid results. Secondly, in my opinion the alteration of search engine results on a competing search engine is beyond reprehensible. Not only does this "data merging" misrepresent the confidence of supposedly sacred organic results on search engines like Google but it appears to be done without the foreknowledge of the installer of the RedZee toolbar. To be certain of this I reviewed the privacy policy and terms of use policy on RedZee and with my untrained eye I discovered nothing that would lead me to believe that the person installing the toolbar has any idea that 3rd party search engines results would be modified."

And he goes on to write, "All-in-all I definitely feel a bit sheepish because I have to admit that I had no idea result hi-jacking was taking place on such a wide scale."

Since I am very familiar now with RedZee, I would be happy to answer any questions anyone may have about this "come-on".

Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware!

Regards,

Win Singleton
wins@summitweb.com