How being a bully fuels this trader's profits because of Google

A very similar circumstance happened to me involving significantly less money. There are a few things I learned:

1) I have never seen a cardholder agreement that doesn't require all disputes to be done in writing.

2) This doesn't mean that the Customer Service Rep will tell you that in order to be fully compliant, you need to submit your claim in writing, nor does it mean that they will tell you anything other than "it's all set". If you're lucky, they might tell you that you should not pay the disputed portion of the bill.

It's not common sense because it's so rare to run into problems like this. Most people have never done a charge-back (I've done less than ten in my life and most were in the late 90s). It's incredibly important to research your terms when something like this arises and follow them carefully. For credit cards, the dispute process is usually written on the back of your statement.

Here's an example from a bill in my hand:

"If you think there is an error on your statement, write to us at:

<bank>

In your letter, give us the following information: Account information... Dollar amount... Description of problem...

You must notify us of any potential errors in writing (their emphasis).

You may call us, but if you do not we are not required to investigate any potential errors and you may have to pay the amount in question." (I used the billing mistake section, but the charge-back section is basically the same with a few more restrictions and refers to this process in its writing).

The reporter did a disservice in not explaining where Ms. Rodriguez may have faltered in her dealing with Citibank and not providing a few tips for people running into this sort of jerk (or jerk-company-response). My personal tip, make copies of everything you send including the envelope and send it certified mail. If you still get jerked around by a large corporation and you don't have hopes of getting your story written up in the New York Times, send a letter outlining your problem with a detailed timeline to the same corporate address (or a more appropriate one if you can find it) and include a CC: line with whatever regulatory body oversees the industry in question ... along with your local and state representative. That netted me a triple refund (disputed amount was $45) after two months of getting nowhere.

That being said, don't buy a suspiciously cheap camera from a store that's closed on Saturday unless you've done your due diligence. And even then you're taking a risk.

A more thorough investigation would have saved me the trouble. If you've never heard of a company, a significantly lower price from a high cost location is a definite warning sign.

Nofollow was a solution to spam on forums and comment pages (which didn't solve any problem for forums or blogs, since people spam nofollow ones regardless, but it solves a problem for search engines trying to decide which links on a blog were hand-placed with a minimum of work). It isn't obvious to me that everybody on the Internet should necessarily be up on current best practices for solving Google's problems, because most people do not put links into their web pages for the purpose of improving your link graph.

Yet, I'd say you're being unfair to the person who made the original submission. That person didn't "write" the title. They used the same title that the newspaper story has.

On a bad day, writing your own title (as is the case for this submission) can get you angry comments from readers. (That said, I personally agree with you that sometimes it makes sense to write your own title instead of using the title used by the newspaper )

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“Just throw in ‘designer eyeglasses,’ ‘designer eyewear’ and a couple different brand names,” he says, “and I’m all set.”

All of which, they did. Shameful.

The second company to try to make money on the web was Netscape. It was founded in 1994, however its IPO was in 1995. So that is two reasons why 1995 is important at the beginning of online commerce.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ http://www.phishtank.com/ http://toolbar.netcraft.com/

EDIT: You can also report them to McAfee Secure and Authorize.net. I don't think they are happy about having a scamming merchant using their logos.

If this had happened to me it would have actually been enough to make him my new favorite target. Judging by a quick purview of the source of his page it probably wouldn't have ended up pretty well for him either.

But what I meant was that some sort of an editorial process would help in these situations, and the people that usually get up in arms about organic results and anti-trust should accept that this falls under first amendment rights and can be very useful in improving results.