Thomasnet Thomasnet ripped me off and hurt my website ranking in Google Manhattan, New York

Few months ago I got talked into listing my company with Thomasnet directory. Their salesperson was very convincing about their unique relationship with the search engines and the benefit of having a link to my site on their directory. I agreed. 2 weeks after I paid them over 5k in fees my site suddenly dropped in their directory listings and the sales person said that I needed to pay 3k more to have top spot. Once again I agreed. At this point I am out 8k in 2 weeks. A month passes this time and their salesperson calling me once again saying that I was outbid and needed to pay another thousand to keep top listings. At this point I am concerned that this is some type of a scam. So i contact one of my competitors that listed on the top and he told me that his sales rep was doing the same thing. Their blind bidding system allows Thomasnet to scam companies out of huge sums money very quickly.

After realizing that i was taken for a ride, I immediately called my credit card company to have the charges reversed. Thankfully the operator told me that I was not the only one asking for refunds and apparently they are doing this for quite some time.

With regards to Seo, Thomasnet sales rep said that by having a link in their directory will improve my pagerank. Google clearly states that selling links against their policies and can get your site banned. Thomasnet continues to offer this as a value added service. So after being listed in their directory I noticed that my site pagerank went from 5 to 0. I did some research and turned out that my site was penalized by Google for buying links.

Stay away from Thomasnet. They ripped me of the tune of 8 grand and got my website penalized by Google.