My Horrible Experience With Advanced Access!
I am writing about the horrible experience I have had with Advanced Access in the hope that I can prevent someone else from ending up in a similar situation. I paid AA $4390 for their template website and Premium Marketing Service.
I was told at the time I signed up for my Premium Marketing Package that the metatags and keywords would be customized for each of my webpages. This has not been done. Instead, all of my webpages have the same metatags and keywords. So, for example, when you search in google for my website the same one page is the only thing that shows up as having been indexed.
I was also told at the time I signed up for my Premium Marketing Package that I would receive a monthly analysis of my website with personalized suggestions as to how I could add to, or alter, the content of my website to increase my search engine rankings. Despite this promise, the first time I received an e-mail from AA with specific suggestions on how to improve my search engine rankings was July 2007. These suggestions were only provided to me after I called AA to find out what was going on with the search-engine optimization of my website. During this call, I was also told that the person who had been assigned to optimize my website was no longer with AA and that I would have to be assigned a new representative. Had I not called AA, I don’t know when you would have figured out that no one was working on the search-engine optimization for my website.
I was told at the time I signed up for my Premium Marketing Package that I would have website statistics that would tell me how many unique visitors I was getting to my website and where they were coming from. Despite my request more than 2 months ago that my website stats be fixed, I do not have access to the stats for unique visitors to my website.
When I called to sign up for a website with AA, I was told that the new 4.0 version of their website template would be available the week after I called to sign up for a website. When I asked whether I should wait until the following week to sign-up, I was told I did not need to wait because all of the 3.0 websites would be converted to 4.0 at the same time. Ten months later, my website has yet to be converted to 4.0. I made 3 separate inquiries to find out when my website would be converted to the 4.0 template, but each time I was told that AA had no idea when the conversion was going to occur.
These are just some of the ways in which AA has failed to live up to the promises that were made to me when I signed up for the Premium Marketing Package. More than 10 months after I signed up for the Premium Marketing Package with AA, my website still has not been optimized. As the statistics for October show, I had 25 visitors to my website last month.
I sued AA in small claims court and obtained a judgment against them for all of the money I paid them to optimize my website. AA has appealed the Judge’s decision, failing to acknowledge any responsibility for their inability to optimize my website.
(Comment received by Moderator on December 4, 2007)
AA’s marketing department is a joke. Their worse then their salesman!!!
You find a kid just out of highschool who says he knows a little bit about computers, hire him as a customer support rep, then give it a month or two and he becomes a professional SEO expert! These idiots have no seo training whatsoever. The first day they get hired on as an SEO expert their told one pieace of advice… tell your CS whatever you want, but make sure they only do it to one page in case your wrong.
SEO isn’t black magic. Rewrite your title tags for all your pages, make sure everything is easily indexable by the search engines, and get as many people (or directories) to link to your site. The last part… linking… is the real key.
But hears the real getcha… you can pay an outside company $30 and bamp, you got yourself 100 links. But AA doesn’t even do that! Instead they pay two little right outta highschool kids min wage to manually enter a sites into 100 or so free directories. Just look at any two AA sites that have the premium marketing package,… all of them have links from the same sites!??!
I’d keep ranting on about the company, but then someone in AA might figure out who I am.
Not to defend them, because believe me when i tell you I have no reason to, the above is not necessarily true. Yes the SEO specialists are very young however they are pretty well trainined. Whether or not they retain that training is a completely different story.
btw. the ex-Presidents need to start spell checking their posts before I assume it must be someone on the current AA Executive management team adding these comments.
Terribly sorry to point this out Mr President, but your ignorance is showing. Relying solely on inbound linking for the SEO of your sight is akin to the reciprocal linking that got everyone into so much trouble in the first place. Eventually this sort of “Grey Hat” SEO is going to be treated with the same universal five handed slap as all the previous methods have.
What happened to Keyword Rich content? Strategically placed in site page anchors? Properly matching content to meta keywords? Quality Linking? I can go on and on with effective, permanent, ways to maximize the search engine efficiency of your site. Information that is common, freely accessible data to anyone with any sense at all.
I suggest you do your homework, and invest in a spell checker, before you attempt to slander anyone else for improper techniques.
Yeah, keep ranting Adams… I seriously have to question that you really work at AA… You don’t seem to have a grasp of SEO, or AA’s marketing dept. I bet you just wanted to join the Flame wagon… This site is good for that. Too bad there’s a ton of mis-information as well. If you pay $30 for someone for SEO, all I can say is you’ll get exactly what you pay for…
Moderator, one of my client’s reported a similar problem to me and also posted it on RealTalk today. Since I haven’t asked her permission to quote, I’ll paraphrase and omit her name: “I have had problems with AA for a couple of years. First I had a “Silver” marketing program. My advisor did very little marketing of my site, then she left the company. Her replacement admitted that yes, there were problems with the work not being done. So I was advised to put my two already high ranking sites in the “Gold” marketing package. After nine months or so, on 30% of the the +/- 140 links that were to have been added to my site were completed. Instead of saying “I will get on this right away and correct it,” I was told that I was “the first one to call them on it”.