AT&T Yellowpages scam

I have a client who has a nice website I designed. I landed him when he complained to his computer guru that his website wasn't coming up on any of the search engines. I took a look at his existing site and noted several things:

The site was put together using 1990s technology (and many sites still out there are). All of the HTML code was inline code and he was not formatting his website using CSS. That pushes you down a lot on search engines. I redid his website in its entirety and, within three days, his company was on Google's first page in their mapping section. That's unheard-of performance.

Back in December, 2008, he signed a one-year contract with AT&T Yellowpages to push people to his website. The salesperson claimed that he'd receive 60 visitors monthly. He was told that AT&T has proprietary SEO technologies and a whole lot of gooberspeak for a sales pitch. My customer took the bait.

First of all, nobody who has no access to the actual code on your website can "search engine optimize" your website. the way you do SEO is to clean up your site's code so that you don't have much inline code on your page. Also you want a site that is W3C compliant with standards and you can validate any site here. If the AT&T Yellopages salesperson told my client that they were going to SEO his website, he didn't know what he was talking about or was simply lying to get a sale. But there is another way to drive traffic to a website and that is to create inbound links.

And that is, essentially what AT&T Yellowpages did: They placed advertisements online for my client to try to "drive traffic." My client could have done the same thing. AT&T doesn't charge per click, they charge a monthly fee. And they mark up per-click ads.

I showed my client how to create a marketing campaign using Google's AdWords. As a result, he is paying Google directly around $100 to $150 monthly -- except when it is not useful for his seasonal business to do that. He has complete control. He can run multiple advertisements, he can make special offers, he can change the wording on a seasonal basis -- anything he wants. And it's a fraction of what AT&T Yellowpages wants.

So, now he wants out of his contract. And I looked at his AW Stats, which are collected by most good Hosting Providers and I don't see their claimed 60 hits monthly. AT&T Yellowpages sent him a spreadsheet showing 63 hits on his website in January. As my client installs in-ground sprinkler systems in your lawn, I'm not thinking that's credible because nobody is planning for sprinkler systems in the middle of winter in Connecticut.

And the funny thing is that their spreadsheet did not correctly add up the monthly total hits to a grand total! It was two short and there was no formula in the totals box! Someone just entered in a random number!

So today we were supposed to have a three-way conversation with AT&T Yellowpages at 9:00 AM. At 8:29, they want to know if we can do it on Friday. They're "having trouble coordinating schedules," despite the fact that this 9:00 AM conversation was set by them yesterday but proposed on June 19th by a gal named Audrey B. She wanted my documentation and I sent over the AW Stats I had collected since December that show that there are nowhere near the number of hits on his website (pre-redesign and optimization by me) as a result of their campaign.

Oh, but wait, can't do it Friday, can we do it Thursday?

It sounds to me like they're fishing for a time when I am not available.

In a way, I pity AT&T Yellowpages. The print version of their Yellowpages (which arrived last January) is one third smaller than last year's issue. And the AT&T Yellowpages book was sold last Summer, when Bush was refusing to talk about a recession and well before any sense of economic emergency, so I would suggest the downsizing of the print edition was not driven by a poor economy. People are just not going to a book any more to find companies to do business.

But taking money from customers and not performing on your end is not a good way to do business. I wish them luck in their uncertain future as more and more of their clients catch on to their scams.