First, you're asking us to change the way we do things over 1 customer out of over 10,000 customers that doesn't like this service. Would you invest money in changing a system that works and that 10,862 customers have enjoyed, just because 1 person says they don't like the service? We are not forcing something on customers that they don't want.
All of our customers want to have better rankings in search engines to make more money, and we assist them with that. The majority of our customers cannot afford to pay for search engine promotion services, and know little or nothing to even try to get listed on their own. How is getting their site listed and making them money a
bad thing?
We have not ignored this customer's very serious complaint; we addressed it immediately. We flagged the listing to no longer be parsed by search engines as soon as the issue was brought to our attention, without delay. Whether the customer liked this service or not, whether we should or should not do it by default, does not change the fact that the listing was already there, and that we did everything in our power to assist the customer to resolve the issue. If we owned Google, we certainly would have taken the listing down immediately, if that were within our power.
The site was "mangled" only for our special version of the site because
http://zeus.meccahosting.com/~a000xxxx/ requires that links are "relative", which means that a link to /images/myimage.gif would need to be changed to images/myimage.gif. Generally, most links are created as relative by the web publishing software, but there are some that create absolute paths. If this type of problem occurs, we typically work with the customer to help them change the paths from absolute to relative pathing.
As far as an already well-ranked domain, our listing would only interfere if it obtains a higher ranking (which is not a bad thing; higher is always better), which in this case it was more highly-ranked than the customers listing. I'll explain why we get better search engine rankings a bit later. Since our listing took precedence (it did not remove their existing listing, it was only more highly ranked), the problem with the links being absolute and not relative was a big problem, and one that we should have worked closely with the customer on.
In regards to cloaking, this is something that has nothing to do with what we're talking about; however, I will briefly explain what cloaking is and why you can be blacklisted for doing it. The most search engine friendly page would be a type of page you would never want a human to see; it would have a lot of keyword redundancy, images would only exist further down the page, and the content of the page would not read well. What some people choose to do, referred to as cloaking, is that when they detect that the visitor is a robot and not a human, they decide to display a totally different web page; one that is tailored to the search engine, rather than humans.
Finally, I will briefly touch on search engine promotion to help you better understand why it is so hard, and why it costs so much money; in addition, it is my hope that you'll better understand why we're in a better position to help customers. The most important factor, as any
SEO will tell you, is "popularity" which is applied to the root domain. This means that you have to have a lot of external sites pointing into your website to gain "popularity". How many links? Hundreds, Thousands, even Millions; the more the better, and the more you have the higher you will be ranked. In addition, the overall size of the website plays a major factor, as a large site is considered more credible. How many pages should you have? Well, generally, to be considered a credible site, at least 100 web pages, but more is better. There are certainly many other factors involved, but popularity and size play a large role, which make it very, very hard for small sites to rank well.
These special URLs rank well solely because they have the meccahosting.com domain; they would not rank well otherwise. Our website has almost 100,000 pages of content associated with it, which gives the domain credibility with all major search engine providers. We have tens of thousands of links into our sites, which are one-way links and not link exchanges (link exchanges are not highly valued by search engines). This gives all our customers an immediate boost and helps get them ranked and ranked well, without doing any work. Of course, if the customer wants to improve their listings even more, we suggest that they assess keyword usage and placement; keyword frequency and precedence are important as to what keywords they will be found under.
I won't respond further to this issue here. I will just say that we've been in business for over 7 years and have thousands of customers. You'll find our posts on forums all around the world where we openly share information, such as how to get listed on search engines, how to develop websites that sell, and other important topics. I hope that everyone would keep an open mind and look at our company, not from the perspective of just a single dissatisfied customer, but from the thousands of posts on the Internet to the contrary. I don't think you will find many other complaints on the Internet about Mecca Hosting; only a lot of "thank yous".
I'll only close with stating that search engine visibility is important, and everyone works to be found in search engines. We are assisting customers in getting ranked and they make money as a result, which we think is a very good thing. We also have over 10,000 customers that will tell you the same thing. Certainly, they would prefer to be listed under their own domain and not ours, but they understand the reasons, and getting listed and getting customers is what is important to them; not how it had to be accomplished.
Thank you all for listening.
Bill