Article by Lisa D. Myers Get Special Price” to Appear in Google Maps, Now! captured my attention. Lisa wrote about company from Norway which offered her friend to submit business in Google Maps. As we know, Google doesn’t offer any featured, paid, express, sponsored submissions but some companies still use shady tactics trying to sell free service to business owners who are not too savvy in technology and web marketing. Working in advertising industry for many years I saw a lot of examples when companies with big names try to cheat and add “extra” services to their bill. It raise my eyebrows and make me laugh when some sales agent call or come to my office trying to sell me something with hopes that I still live in 1986.

The most unique and sometimes funny tactics I met:

We’ll keep meta tags on your website for $1000 / month!

Yacht dealer from New England hired me to help with SEO and I noticed right away that website doesn’t have meta tags. I called their CMS (content management) provider, apparently multinational company, and asked why meta tags is missing and there is no way to access FTP or add them through their content management. Representative on the phone told me that it will cost $1000 / month to activate meta tags option on a website. Holly crap! How come I never came up first with this “genius” idea”!
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