Many real estate agents familiar with Reply.com, might find the bellow piece of information rather interesting. The information is posted on BBB.org website on Reply.com profile. I will however put it here in it’s entirety. I don’t believe that $70,000 in fines will put a dent into Reply.com’s finances. After all Reply.com did file for IPO and once Reply.com’s stock starts trading there will be rivers of milk and honey flowing in San Ramon and surroundings…. Or something to that effect, unless the “IPO spoof” was really a “for sale” sign.

Enough said, here is what apparently took place in the beginning of this year:
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A minor point of irritation, for me, was to discover just how badly blogger.com treats things like meta tags.

Now I know full well that meta tags are not exactly ground breaking for SEO but when it comes to social linking several tags can be quite important. Specifically the meta description tag. When posting a link in facebook the meta description is the first source of content for describing the link.

Ugly facebook link

I first noticed this when working on my Face Link tool which was created to make facebook link links for blogs. Here is an example of a good looking link to my blog. You can see that the tool was able to get a title and a description

The fantastic site of Lord Matt

The realm of Lord Matt – Lord of vast imaginary tracts of hyperspace.

Generated by Face Link Tool with thumbnail by BitPixels

Beyond making my little applications work the meta part of a web page also impacts of the quality of your search engine results listing. The description being used most often as the text that goes with the search result.

As such in a competitive market not using a description tag is a fatal mistake that your competitors will take advantage of.

So the result is not just that pretty much all blogger blogs produce rubbish looking links in facebook but that they have a significant disadvantage when the going gets tough. After searching for a while I have concluded that there is not really a decent solution to this aside from putting Google off with duplicate description and keywords.

In short blogger.com is not, in my opinion, suited to the world of web 2.0 nor business marketing.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Many internet startups find it privileged to be reviewed by TechCrunch. But even if TechCrunch’s verdict for you is a deadpool, although the author did not tagged that post with “deadpool“, it is still an opportunity for dialog. LeapFish’s employees screwed up so badly that opportunity that TechChrunch team had to ban their IPs from posting comments. Here are the snapshots of some parts of that exchange:

Please note that Robin Wauters is the author of the original article on TechCrunch.

Here is another warning by Robin which LeapFish employees completely ignore:

Finally TechCrunch blocks the IPs from where the shill comments appear to originate:

Later the CEO of LeapFish showed up and “apologized” for his employees- you can read the entire exchange on TechCrunch.

Back in May, United Kingdom legislators have made it illegal for businesses to engage in the above described deceptive marketing.

It may not be such a bad idea to prohibit and criminalize such behavior here in the US as well. Don’t you think?

Update: Bellow are the links to more LeapFish reviews.

LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau. Note that BBB.org rates LeapFish at C- on a A+ to F scale.

A Brief Tale Of Sleaze- LeapFish should take Rob Shore’s advise and never lie to their potential clients.

Three Scams and Rip-Offs to Report – Kit Eliot describes his “encounter” with LeapFish.

Leapfish: Google Competitor or Flash In The Pan?- i think it is rather funny, or insane, to think that LeapFish can actually be viewed as Google’s competitor. But it sure makes a good headline. Well put article, a must read.

LeapFish Affiliate Program. Can Giveaways Keep It Afloat?- a post by yours truly. I thought it was a mistake to link their affiliate program to the basic function of their website- the search function. Their widgets also contain SEO friendly links back to their website- my conclusion their affiliate program is really a linking scheme to gain rankings in search engines.

Leapfish is a scam…maybe?- Patrick Sullivan Jr is offering his opinion about leapfish. The blog have attracted number of comments- well worth reading.

LeapFish Sucks- a take on LeapFish by Cole Pannell- a web designer and a SEO professional.

LeapFish.com advertisers beware – yet another account of dealing with LeapFish sale people.

Leapfish Review – Is LeapFish.com an opportunity, scam, or just another meta search site?- short but to the point rundown about advertising on LeapFish- needless to say the author passes on the opportunity to advertise or invest in LeapFIsh.

I have been member of MyBlogLog since December of 2006 (feel free to add me to your contacts). You probably recognize the widget that shows the latest visitors to this blog located in the side bar.

Through this widget I have met and connected with many outstanding bloggers, business owners, real estate agents and just your regular every day Joe and Jane. In fact it is one of the first place I check every time I work on my blog. Just to see if there was some one new today on my blog or to be absolutely humbled by the fact that some one found my blog interested enough to pay another visit. Never have I imagined I will be banning some one from appearing on that widgets. In fact I never new exactly how to do it. So I learned today…

To my surprise it was very easy. Just hover with your cursor (aka mouse) over the picture of the person you would like to ban. A small red square with a white “X” (as shown in the snapshot below) will appear in the upper left corner of the persons avatar- you have to click on the red little square:

You will be taken to a confirmation page on MyBlogLog website. On that page (see another snapshot below- click on it to see the full size) you have to click the button that says confirm:

That’s it now you know how to ban some one’s avatar or picture appearing on your website. You might have to repeat the above steps if you have several blog listed on MyBlogLog and each blog having its own widget- although I am not 100% sure.

I have decided to make a major change on this blog. As you can see I am going about it in an usual manner, but I would also like the regular readers to help me out.

A little background….

I owned this domain from the time I have been active real estate agent. The headline “Real Estate Review Blog” sounded like a good idea at the time. However it does not reflect accurately what this blog is all about. There are plenty of outstanding real estate bloggers who at the same time are also great Realtors. I think it is not my place to even address this aspect on my blog, since I do not have hands on experience in the real estate industry.

It is also reflected in that 90% of what I have written here are only remotely related to real estate as my targeted audience is real estate agents.

The traffic to this website and keywords by which users find my blog speak laud and clear. Many of visitors have come to look for subject related to blogging, internet marketing and social media marketing. I am not sure I have ever planed for this, but I think I am ready to start making lemonade out of free lemons.

I have an idea as to what the new headline will read, however I would like to hear your suggestions.

Thanks in advance.