Simply put, the problem with the housing market right now, not the problem for investors or banks but the problem for the people living in the homes, is that it has become more lucrative for many servicers to foreclose on the property than to work out a modification. That changes all of the incentives around housing, and makes fraud attractive. That the system was swamped with calls for modifications after pushing people into loans that they couldn’t afford when they recast makes fraud all the more attractive. Foreclosure pays in particular for servicers who don’t also own the loan: for them, they’d rather pay a foreclosure mill a flat rate to process the homes rather than pay more staff to do person-to-person modifications and all the things that go with that: verification of income, negotiation, etc. This happens to be, in most cases, the mega-servicers who are owned by the big banks.
And foreclosure not only pays for servicers, it really pays off for the foreclosure mill law firms, who can process this stuff at a rapid pace and, until the revelations, get judgments with virtually no opposition. And lo and behold, Wall Street private equity firms are behind the foreclosure mills in some cases. The lawsuit on behalf of homeowners claims that Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, has benefited from what the lawsuit calls an illegal fee-splitting arrangement between Prommis Solutions and several of the busiest foreclosure law firms it controls. Great Hills is the biggest stakeholder in Prommis, a company that acts as a middleman between mortgage servicers and law firms. A lawyer for Prommis rejected that claim, and officials of Great Hill Partners did not respond to inquiries. But a review of public filings, company news releases and other public statements shows that several private equity firms or entities they control have stakes in the business operations of some of the busiest foreclosure law firms in New York, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia and Texas. Cue the line about Wall Street sticking its blood funnel into anything that makes money. Prommis Solutions adds nothing of value but is just a go-between for the servicers and the foreclosure mills. They just skim off the top. And their profit margins are likely pretty low, and so they encourage cost-cutting measures:
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When researching SEO companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature - people love a guarantee. This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing "guaranteed SEO." Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill-placed.
A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a "leprechaun repellent" guarantee. In other words, it's a guarantee that is easily attainable - if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain?
The truth is that SEO companies do not control the major search engines, and any firm that claims to have a "special relationship" that gives it sway over the natural search engine results is simply counting on your ignorance. Fortunately, this does not mean that guaranteed SEO is impossible, especially when the guarantee has to do with aggregate results and the methods used to achieve them.
What follows is a partial list of some of the more popular types of guaranteed SEO out there - some of them roughly as useful as leprechaun repellent, and some of them actually meaningful.
Questionable Guarantees
The "Leprechaun Repellent" Keyphrases Guarantee
Many SEO companies boast that they will achieve a certain number of top rankings in the organic results of major search engines. This type of guaranteed SEO can be tempting, especially to those who are investigating SEO companies for the first time. After all, high rankings are what it's all about, right? Isn't that the goal?
The answer is an emphatic "No." Quality SEO companies will point out that the real goal is to bring high quality traffic to your site. It's quite simple to guarantee top positions if you choose non-competitive or obscure phrases - for example, "leprechaun repellent." Want proof? Enter "leprechaun repellent into your favorite search engine. You will almost certainly find this article dominating the results (caveat - if you are reading this article immediately after its release, the search engines may not have indexed it yet. Wait a week and try again.).
It is extremely easy for SEO companies to achieve high search engine positions for phrases that nobody uses. Such rankings might impress your friends and neighbors, but they won't send you quality traffic. They likely won't send you any traffic at all. It's important to note that the phrase "leprechaun repellent" is used only for demonstrative purposes. Many unpopular phrases may not sound absurd. There are surely countless phrases out there that sound extremely relevant to your business that are never typed into search engines. Good SEO companies will avoid such phrases. "Leprechaun repellent" practitioners will embrace them - it allows them to attain their worthless guarantees.
There is also another aspect of this type of guaranteed SEO in which SEO companies will guarantee you first place positions on unspecified search engines for more competitive phrases. Unfortunately, this type of guaranteed SEO often involves obscure engines that have very little market share and are not sophisticated enough to quickly eliminate web pages that use spam tactics. In a few documented cases, the guarantees involved search engines that the SEO companies actually owned and operated!
There are really only three major search engines at present - Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are a handful of minor engines that are also worth mentioning, including Ask Jeeves and AOL Search. Any guaranteed SEO should involve prominent engines, not obscure ones.
The "Company Name" Guarantee
There is also a common guarantee that shady SEO companies will use that guarantees that a company will show up for a search on its company name. This, much like the "leprechaun repellent" flavor of guaranteed SEO, offers no real value. Sure, if your company name is "Acme," it may actually be competitive - but chances are that if your website does not already show up near the top of the search engine results for a search on your company name, there is an easily fixed technical glitch that will resolve the issue. Quality SEO companies will address this area immediately. Moreover, ranking highly for your company name, while obviously desirable, provides only a tiny fraction of the potential value of search engine marketing. The real benefit for most companies is that search engine marketing attracts potential buyers who are not already familiar with the company name. Unless your company is a household name, it is unlikely that having your company name figure prominently in the results is going to have a huge impact on your business.
The Pay-Per-Click Guarantee
Some SEO companies will offer guaranteed SEO services that promise top positions for certain keyphrases on popular engines, but they are counting on dealing with prospects who do not understand the difference between natural search engine results and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. With PPC, it is very easy to guarantee a number one result, but this result will appear in the "paid" or "sponsored" results of the engine. Say, for example, that your company installs custom swimming pools. While a competitive phrase like "custom pools" might be difficult to achieve in organic results, the SEO company is not concerned with organic results. All it has to do is outbid the current highest bidder (using your money, of course), and your site will show up as number one in the "sponsored" results. Studies have indicated that sponsored results are held in a lower regard than natural results by savvy web searchers who recognize them as advertising. Also, as soon as you stop paying, your ranking disappears.
The "Submit Your Site to 50,000 Search Engines" Guarantee
There are many variations on this offer, primarily involving the number of engines promised. Regardless of the number, this is probably the most pervasive and persistent type of "guaranteed SEO," and it is basically a scam that preys on ignorance.
Companies that believe that they have high quality websites are predisposed to believe that the only thing holding them back from search engine success is that the search engines do not yet know that their sites exist. However, search engines measure quality in a much different way than a website owner does. A properly optimized site does not need to be submitted to search engines at all (I refer to actual "spider-based" search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN, not human-edited directories such as Business.com, the Yahoo Directory, and the Open Directory Project). Engines prefer to find sites on their own.
This "solution" offers no real value, except of course to the SEO companies offering the service. Also, as previously mentioned, there are not 50,000 search engines - or at least 50,000 search engines worth worrying about. Do SEO companies that offer this service meet this guarantee? Certainly - they use automated programs to do the submissions. Is this type of guaranteed SEO worthwhile? Not for search engine positions, but it may keep leprechauns at bay.
Meaningful Guarantees
Given the preponderance of "guaranteed SEO" that is meaningless, the seemingly Wild West nature of the industry, and the reality that SEO companies do not control the results of any major engine, it may seem that guaranteed SEO can never be a worthwhile endeavor. However, this is not the case. If you note the examples above, they are primarily involved in specifics - top positions, a certain number of submissions, a certain number of engines. However, good SEO companies, understanding that they have no control over individual results, should be confident enough in the results of their work in aggregate and in the safety of the methodologies that they use to offer guaranteed SEO that lives up to its promise.
The Custom Guarantee
In very rare cases, certain skilled, experienced SEO companies will be able to develop for you a custom guarantee derived from the analysis of your current traffic data, the competitiveness of your industry, and the status of your site. You will ideally be offered this type of specialized guarantee from the beginning of your dealings with an SEO firm because it ensures that you will be achieving targeted, meaningful results based on your specific situation, rather than on generalities that could apply to any business in any industry. Some SEO companies may tell you that a custom guarantee is not possible because they have no direct control over search engine results. However, SEO companies who have been in business for a while know how to weather the algorithm shifts and understand that there is more than one popular search engine. Such a firm will be confident enough to create and back a custom guarantee for you.
The Targeted Traffic Guarantee
SEO companies dedicated to showing value to their clients will take a baseline reading of current search engine traffic at the outset of a campaign. While, as previously mentioned, SEO companies do not hold sway over search engine results, they should at least be confident enough in their overall skills to promise that their clients will see an increase in targeted search engine traffic based on popular phrases relevant to the business. If the firm offering this type of guaranteed SEO charges on a monthly basis, any month of the engagement where traffic for targeted phrases does not, at a minimum, exceed the baseline should not be charged. After all, you are paying on a monthly basis to protect and improve your positions. While major algorithm shifts that make results on individual results unstable can and do happen, they rarely happen on all engines at once. You should feel confident that the firm you are paying has a very vested interest in making sure it adapts to the changing nature of search engine algorithms, and few things inspire such confidence as knowing that it will not get paid otherwise. If your prospective firm is unwilling to at least guarantee that it will send increased traffic to your website from targeted phrases, every month, it may be time to look elsewhere.
The "White Hat" Guarantee
SEO companies are commonly broken up into two camps - "white hats" (practitioners who remain solidly within the search engine's stated terms of service) and "black hats" (practitioners who work to unravel the latest search engine algorithms and base their optimization techniques largely on technology, regardless of the engine's terms of service). Both approaches are legitimate - after all, there is nothing illegal about exploiting a technical loophole for results. However, black hat SEO companies put their clients at risk of penalization or even outright banishment from the major engines. Getting back in can be a long process, and sometimes it is not possible at all. If you are concerned about potential penalization, get a guarantee from your firm that they adhere to the stated terms of service of all major search engines. If you can (and this is rare), get a guarantee that your site will not be penalized through any action of the SEO firm. This is harder for a company to offer, since the major engines frequently update their terms of service, and techniques that are acceptable today can be deemed unacceptable tomorrow. However, a confident firm that always errs on the side of caution when optimizing client websites will offer this type of guaranteed SEO services, since it will not use techniques that have a potential for penalization in the future.
Abusing the Metaphor (Beating a Dead Leprechaun)
Guarantees have been around for at least as long as leprechauns have been hoarding breakfast cereal and starring in bad horror films. So have guarantees that are essentially meaningless but sound respectable. A good guarantee should not only appeal to the base emotion of a potential purchaser, but it should also afford some real protection that the purchase he or she is making will provide meaningful results. Many of the most popular types of guaranteed SEO do not, and that's a shame. The industry already has a questionable reputation due to "leprechaun repellent" practitioners - make sure you don't go chasing their rainbow. After all, it's your pot of gold they are after.
About the Author
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, Lockergnome, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, Cirronet, and DS Waters. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Scott_Buresh
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Dennis the menace Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 7:36 am
That series of previous Fraudclosure posts was way ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying the problem before the MSM and putting it onto context. Bravo.
Where is your Amazon wish list? I made oodles shorting BAC on your reporting
Mike in Nola Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 7:44 am
I heard this a week or so ago. Don’t know if it they got it from Taibbi or if it was independent:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130729666
Sounds like a redo of The Octopus.
Mike in Nola Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 7:46 am
Hit the send button a little quickly. Wanted to add that at least The Octopus helped to advance the country. It wasn’t soleyl about extracting money from the populace in exchange for nothing.
Petey Wheatstraw Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:07 am
“ . . . banks that should have been allowed to fail under the weight of their own incompetence . . .”
____________
Incompetence has nothing to do with it (although it’s the automatic assumption drawn by most). Criminality is at the heart of the Corporatist putsch.
Hot Links: Insider Dump The Reformed Broker Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:11 am
Matt Taibbi is covering the the Fraudclosure story now. Goodie gumdrops. (TBP)
ToNYC Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:18 am
No Taxation Without Representation rang pretty true and loudly in the early 1770′s.
ZIRP seems to have been a phenomenal misdirection acronym when in fact it is a 90% tax on the hard-earned and put-away life savings earned Interest for an extended period being denied in favor of bank monopoly protector and counterfeit credit money provider Federal Reserve.
All Interest With Representation should be the current cry in the 2010′s
No surprise Florida judges love those Banks too, watching ZIRP giving them incredible margins paying 0.25% and sold to you at 29.99%
Petey Wheatstraw Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:42 am
Never forget that the courts are wholly-owned by the law industry (that our legal system has become a huge cash-cow industry is the first proof that our Constitutional Republic has fallen), under the aegis of the Bar Associations. The Law Division of the Corporatist State.
The Judges don’t work for you. The lawyers don’t work for you. They work towards the enrichment of their bretheren by maladministering and manipulating the already bloated, poorly written and loophole ridden Federal, State, and local Codes (provided for them by their enterprise partners in the Legislative Division).
Think about this: Not one of these retired judges questioned the legality of what they were doing (being that they are judges, one would think they would at least question the legality of what they were asked to do). The Judiciary is full of robo-signers.
Oh, the corporatocracy of it all.
financial Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:43 am
If Mr. Taibbi was at least a little incompetent, you could read this as being an exaggeration. Unfortunately, he is not, and as such what he write must be taken at face value. The level of fraud here is just mind blowing. Those we were responsible will get away with it. One comment I though was a little of with regards to JPM which is known to be much more careful in its documentation.
This is the proof (as if any was needed) that the American legal and banking system is after a kleptocracy. Unlike China which is open about this, America likes to believe that it is society regulated by laws — its not; apparently if you are a banker you can do a hit-and-run, and if you are a bank you can tell tall stories in court.
VennData Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Tea Party superduperstar Mark Rubio got around the Rocket docket…
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/18/rubio-not-facing-foreclosure-anymore-says-campaign/
So while the WSJ opinion page demands investigations…
“…Our advice would be that Mr. Issa start by finishing his committee’s probe of the Countrywide sweetheart loan program that Democrats tried to deep-six. Tell us which Members and staff of Congress, or officials at Fannie and Mae and Freddie Mac received easy mortgage terms as part of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo’s VIP program. If he lets the facts emerge on Republicans as well as Democrats, Mr. Issa will build credibility as a fair-minded investigator…”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635704575604853386861086.html
Mark Rubio’s slick escape from the “Rocket Docket” is where Issa should start.
GrafSchweik Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Petey W @ 8:42am
I only lurk these days due to a writing project but you really nailed the salient issue as you often do.
The cry must already be echoing in the limousines, helicopters and jets of our Corporate Overlords as they head off each morning for another day of glorious capital and capitol acquisition, “Serfs up!”
FrancoisT Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 9:29 am
When I read the article by Taibbi, I couldn’t help remembering Gonzalo Lira’s post about fascist police-state, most especially this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/06/gonzalo-lira-is-the-u-s-a-fascist-police-state.html
Note that here, the “state” (be it the Federal or the States) have considered the interests of the financial sector to be no different than theirs. Strictly speaking, the State of Florida decided to act as the enforcer for the private big banks and their shareholders at the detriment of their own people.
If that is not a police-state, you tell me what is!
Mannwich Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 9:47 am
“Due process”, “property rights”. How quaint.
mmcd Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Isn’t there a single interested party to scream “BULL#$%^”?
Darkness Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 11:09 am
>>If that is not a police-state, you tell me what is!
I’ve wondered the same thing with regard to cops with guns enforcing copyright law. How twisted is that?
constantnormal Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Your names and aliases have been taken down and these expressions of sedition noted. Please go straight to the local constabulary and turn yourselves in — don’t make us come after you.
(yeah, I know, it’s a bit teabagger, but it seemed to fit …)
perra Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 11:52 am
It’s pretty amazing that they are getting away with this.
wngoju Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
“the reckless behavior of banks that should have been allowed to fail under the weight of their own incoompetence . ..”
In theory Dodd-Frank leaves a regulatory option for Treasury/Fed to do …whatever… to deal with systemic failure. In Theory. “Whatever”. It would/will take a regulator with kahunas to actually do something. Spitzer – yes. Geithner/Sumers/Bernanke/… Naw. The girls – Bair/Warren – not enough power, Not looking good.
constantnormal Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
@perra
“It’s pretty amazing that they are getting away with this.”
Only if you are still clinging to antiquated notion of free markets and a middle-class-driven economy. Adjust your thinking to a giant banana republic, with the masses of sheeple being milked and bilked using the resources of a government that is owned by the moneyed elite, and everything will seem quite appropriate.
ToNYC Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
@wngoju Says:
…you must be meaning a Kahuna with big cojones? We had one once who they drove down Elm Street in Dallas and 50 years ago on Monday, US citizens elected him and junked a pale-gray, used Nixon.
MikeG Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
The teabagger solution is to remove any remaining pitiful restraints by government upon corporations’ ability to engage in looting and cronyism. I can understand why corporate powers embrace this ideology, but it amazes me that any average person (especially one who has ever worked for a corporation) would be stupid enough to think that corporate rule has their interests at heart and that their lives would improve under a corporate-police state.