I am wondering just how many of us have fallen prey to a company called SurfSpeak or it's cloned sister companies? Last year when I first got into the online real estate website world, I was ready to listen to any possible help I could. Then came that phone call from SurfSpeak, a company that promised my website on Top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN for any keyword combination I chose that wasn't already reserved by someone else. They showed me how it worked, by using a browswer plugin that was being distributed to the general public via radio stations, and it had some "nice" features that I thought would indicate it had a bright future.
Like a dummy, I bought the search string for "Arizona real estate", and expected some
good results. 10 months later and I can tell you I haven't received a single prospect from
it. Oh, SurfSpeak can show me I've been receiving 100's of hits a day from their plug-in, but my own stats disagree. Instead, what I see in my stats is a severe case of Fraud going on by Surf Speak. They are using redirects in pop-unders that force the pop under to go to random client sites using the search string that their client purchased, making it appear like actual web surfers are triggering the visit. Unfortunately, ALL the visits are just homepage visits, and they aren't even human spawned, but bot spawned.
Surf Speak is committing Fraud, no doubt about it. Here is the URL that is the smoking gun. This is what shows up on my stats program. From the beginning, I had SurfSpeak set up their ad for me to drop an incoming customer onto a page I created ONLY for SurfSpeak. No real websurfer has EVER gone any further than that entrance page. EVER.
http://plugin.secureservicepack.com:7777/SearchKeyword.dll?redirect=7&URL=
arizona real estate
If anyone knows of an attorney who might like any of this data, feel free
to ask for it. I've got plenty of it. And, I hope I have convinced anyone else who is considering using a company like this to abandon that thought. Truth is, there are a lot of bad companies preying on anyone with a new website. Don't let them get you, too.
Tony Pomykala
Tony@ArizonaMansions.com