Whereas Google, Yahoo and Bing are doing their best to avoid traffic scammers, John D. Rockefeller warns it’s not enough. The US Senate is now warning Google, Yahoo and Bing about Bait-And Switch tactics used by internet scammers and is urging search engines to put an end to black hat SEO.
This Tuesday, Senator John D. Rockefeller sent a letter to the largest search engine providers today. He contacted Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo. In his letter, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation aka John D. Rockefeller warns the three companies they are being scammed with bait-and-switch tactics.
It’s a fraud within search engines that Senator John D. Rockefeller described in the letter as websites “fishing” searchers using fake links or paid websites that can lure the internet users to their websites. It looks like it’s the “link farms” thing all over again.
A few years ago, scammers put into existence the so-called “link farms” which were practically blank websites full of links. Traffic was huge and scammers made lots of dollars. Fortunately, those problems are mostly gone now thanks to updates Panda and Penguin released by Google. Unfortunately, it made way for other scammers.
The US senator says that hundreds of consumer complaints report stumbling upon “Internet moving brokers after entering general search terms into an Internet search engine such as yours”. Thinking they were hiring reputable and legit companies, users found themselves paying for “companies that misrepresented their services and caused them serious financial harm”.
The US Senate investigation found that these Internet moving brokers using bait-and-switch tactics “ranked highly in the search results”. Apparently “some of these companies may be ‘gaming the system’ in order to boost their search rankings”.
A Google spokesperson reacted to the US Senate letter, warning about websites gaming the system, with thanks. In a statement for TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson explained that the search engine is making constant updates, around 500 per year particularly designed to take down the scammers Rockefeller was talking about.
“We’re always looking for ways to make it harder for scammers to trick consumers, so we appreciate the specifics the Committee provided”, reads Google’s statement for TechCrunch.
