Comment by moshthepitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moshthepitt | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting twist in this tale.

Have a look at: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...

It says: "OMG!!!!! We received a call on the office line (the one listed on Mocality) from India stating that they were offering website services. I think the guy on phone was Deepak or something (it sounded almost like a scam) the guy said he was from Google Kenya blah blah, we refused the offer as we already have a site. Then few days ago I was just searching our page when I stumbled upon our site on .kbo.co.ke site…I mailed them n told them to take it down! aaaaaaaarg!!!!!!"

--- This is one of the small businesses contacted by 'Google'. SO it seems that after they got the call, they later saw their business website put up on kbo.co.ke (which is Google owned).

Doesn't this sound like further proof that this is Google sanctioned?

Not really. A small businessman gets cold-called by an SEO/Adwords agency offering to "get you on Google" at a one time special offer. Intrigued, they search Google for their business and find quite a lot of websites referring to their business they didn't know existed before. Connected?

Kbo.ke publicly advertises web hosting for free, and by the sounds of it might be automatically populating the listings. So its a reasonable assumption that someone trying to charge Ks 200 per month for their[?] web hosting service might be aware of the potential to exploit Kbo's existence but isn't acting with their blessing...

My previous small business would receive cold calls from people claiming to be "with Google" or "working with Google" to sell me SEO services weekly. I can see how non-technical business owners who don't understand how "the internets" work could see that as a direct association, and blaming Google themselves when they dont receive what was advertised or if the relationship goes sour.

I haven't checked, but it might be beneficial for Google to come out and say that they will never work with businesses directly to increase their online exposure outside of allowing the business to buy ad space through their official self-serve Adwords platform.

Then again, Google do have certified Adwords professionals and partner companies whose name they don't want to sully with some widely misunderstood statement, and even some of the least reputable search engine agencies offering ad-buying as a service probably have a net benefit on Google's bottom line

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