UPDATE: I've updated this post on  November 13, 2007 to add a link to this PC World story detailing additional reported complaints against Internet Advancement by their customers here in Washington State. The original post is below:

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I got a call today from Ryan with Internet Advancement (link condom applied). According to Ryan our client, Avatar Financial, needs help ranking in the search engines - the meta tags and code are preventing us from doing well. I tried asking Ryan how familiar he was with the SEO industry in general - my guess is that he's just a salesman with a set dialogue who didn't get his coffee this morning. Here's what he told me:

• Meta tags are the keys to getting rankings
• Internet Advancement will submit my site bi-monthly to the 16 major search engines
• Internet Advancement will also submit my site monthly to 8500 minor search engines
• Link popularity is not (as I had presumed) a measurement of the links around the web pointing to a given site/page, but a point system based on how many minor search engines list you - if you don't submit to these sites, you can drop out of the big engines, too.

Ryan became infuriated when I explained that MSN doesn't index the meta keywords tag (something they told me during my interview with them) and that Google and Yahoo! don't consider the meta tags when determining where to rank a site. He got so frothy and yelly (just coined that one) that I had to hang up and call back, but not before making sure Ryan knew just how well Avatar was ranking for all the major keywords.

On my call back, I spoke to a much more mild-mannered gentleman - Shawn. I asked Shawn (somewhat deviously) to explain how Internet Advancement's services work and what I could expect in terms of pricing, etc. His rundown:

• Internet Advancement would do keyword research to tell me what phrases would be most important to target
• They'd add the important meta tags to my site because "search engine ranking is based primarily on meta tags and link popularity"
• They'd get my link popularity "points" up by submitting me to 16 major and 8500 minor search engines (same time frame as before - bi-monthly for majors, monthly for minors)
• They warranty in writing that we would achieve top 10 results at 6 of the 15 major search engines, which include AOL, Netscape, DMOZ, Overture and Hotbot (he couldn't remember all of the others off the top of his head)
• The price plans range from $89.95 - $129.95 with a down payment of $1100-$3000 depending on how much work was needed upfront

It was only after I bid him a good afternoon that I checked the results at Google for "Internet Advancement."

Apparently, they've had scuffles with the Washington State Attorney General's Office, which were resolved in August of 2004 with a minor fine (100+ complaints and they got off with a slap on the wrist). There's some ridiculous denials in this thread on the subject as well as some further examples of their misdeeds and another WebProWorld thread here on the mess they leave with their customers. And to top off their hypocrisy, their own site doesn't have meta tags on it.

All in all, this is one of the most despicable players I've seen in the spam/scam SEO game. It disgusts me to think of the thousands of dollars companies are paying every day to these clowns to get services that carry no business or marketing value whatsoever. These guys are going on my big time sh-t list.

Note: I don't blame the salesmen who call up companies - it's their job and they're paid to do it. It would be ridiculous of me to ask them all to up and quit. The nefarious source of the disinformation script they're given, however, should get the Traffic-Power treatment.