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Report: #839993

Complaint Review: Egumball - Internet

  • Submitted:
  • Updated:
  • Reported By: 1tallguy — San Luis Obispo California United States of America
  • Author Not Confirmed What's this?
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  • Egumball Internet United States of America

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I own a small automotive shop that needs to advertise to stay alive. Period. Internet marketing is the best bang for your buck I know, so I had a web site made. Then I found a company to make it come up on the first page of Google. It worked so well that after a year I had to stop advertising because I couldn't handle any more work. Then about two years later I was too busy for my present location so I moved, to a much more expensive location that is also much bigger. OK Time to expand.

I get a call one day from a Egumball.com rep saying that they're some sort of partners with Google and that Egumball.com is the leading Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) company right now. The timing was right for me and I managed to read only good reviews about them so I went with it. I Signed a year contract too. Which I regretted. 

They were slow on all their work and after I had actually signed up they wouldn't provide any timeline for progress. Months go buy and I find online a totally different website (with several weird characters in it that were a horrible type-o) that they had made me without my knowledge that was just a template site that had a link to my official page. When I called to complain that this wasn't what I had been promised, that I wanted my website, and about the type-o's they said that they would fix the type-o's and never did. Then they said they weren't getting the results they wanted with my site so they made this one for me.  They also couldn't figure out how to access my Google places account so they set up another.

They set up another Google places account. With my website's name! This is the most important part. When Google sees two or more Places accounts for the same Website they group them together and give them one of their more severe penalties. THIS SEVERELY DAMAGES YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION WITH GOOGLE!!! Meaning for me? No front page and lots of wasted money. 

I ended up talking them into letting me out of the contract in 6 months instead of 12 because they screwed up so bad. The biggest problem now is that I'm using an automotive focused SEO company now that really takes the time to describe to me whats going on, and I find out how very, very badly this can effect my overall ranking. Even with more good reviews than anyone else in my town I'm still not on the front page because of this. Whats worse is that if I quit paying to have the SEO done then the damage will never be undone.  

Makes me wonder if others have this same complaint. This has been very costly for me in actual money plus no new customers after the move. I'm moving into an RV now so I can keep the bigger shop. I can't help but think that this could have been easily avoided by using a company that actually knows what they are doing, and cares. I know the economy is horrible, but the phone should be ringing more and I think this is a big part of why its not. 

I hope this post educated at least someone in how to help yourself not have this happen to you and your company. Please don't let Egumball.com do your SEO. Find someone local and small who actually cares.

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 02/16/2012 12:11 AM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/egumball/internet/egumball-severely-wounded-my-online-reputation-with-google-places-internet-839993. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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REBUTTALS & REPLIES:
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2Employee/Owner

#3 REBUTTAL Owner of company

eGumball is an Adwords Certified Partner...

AUTHOR: eGumball Inc. - (United States of America)

POSTED: Monday, June 18, 2012

Although eGumball is an Adwords Certified Partner (soon to be SMB Partner) your post about the exclusivity of being an SMB partner has no relevance.   This post is about a Google Places issue *not* Google Adwords.

Here are the eligibility requirements for the SMB Program from Google:

http://www.google.com/ads/premiersmbpartner/partners-details.html#eligibility



  • Large existing customer base of small / medium sized businesses.


  • Tele / field sales force with the ability to sell Googles advertising products


  • Commitment to provide phone and/or email customer support to their advertiser base


  • Existing operational infrastructure (billing, reporting, etc) to service thousands of customers
eGumball meets and exceeds these requirements.



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#2 Consumer Comment

Partners with Google?

AUTHOR: Jeff - (United States of America)

POSTED: Saturday, June 16, 2012

When a company tells you they are partners with Google the first thing you should do is check them out, and see if they are telling the truth. Go to google.com and type in premier SMB partners in the search bar.  

These premier partners have been hand picked by google due to their long standing history of delivering results to various businesses.  

As you will find out there are only 15 of these businesses in the U.S.  eGumball is definitely not one of them.  

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#1 REBUTTAL Owner of company

Google Doesn't "Severely" Penalize Duplicates

AUTHOR: eGumball Inc. - (United States of America)

POSTED: Monday, March 05, 2012

Where are you getting this information?  Duplicates need to be corrected.  A simple task.

Did you read your agreement?  If so you should understand why we ask you to disclose your Google account.  You didn't.  Having two accounts will create duplicates which will prevent first page placement. 

When you moved did you update all local citations for your business?  Did you take the time to ask/understand how long it takes Google to aggregate data for clustering?  No.

There is no damage and Google Places is a completely separate sport than SEO - which your service agreement is not.

Since we are not the search engine we can only estimate turnaround.

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