There are lots of apologies coming these days from digital marketing company Buuteeq over its content and SEO practices as it tries to expand its foothold in the B&B and innkeeper sector, but met spirited resistance.
Founded in 2010 by Microsoft expatriates Forest Key and Adam Brownstein (see TLabs Showcase), Buuteeq admits it received about 40 complaints from B&B owners, associations and a competitor, largely over charges that it used unauthorized and sometimes inaccurate content from, and about, the B&Bs to build a directory and database.
Much of the criticism from B&B owners and innkeepers took place on a Professional Association of Innkeepers International members-only forum. And some of the complaints come from Acorn Internet Services, a competing digital agency for B&Bs. Buuteeq had openly questioned the effectiveness of Acorn IS's services.
There are a lot of issues involved, which date to late last year, but came to a head this month, including:
Preview Sites and Google Indexing
Buuteeq created preview websites for free users and paid subscribers of its Cloud DMS service and these preview sites, many with inaccurate information, got erroneously tagged so that Google started indexing them, according to Buuteeq CEO Key.
In an April 16 blog post, Acorn IS calls these published websites, which involved some of its client B&Bs, "unauthorized and non-requested" and has provided instructions to B&B owners for getting these sites out of Google search results and how to file copyright complaints.
"It has been more than a full week and these unauthorized pages have yet to abet," Acorn writes. "Experts indicate that it can take 30, 60 to 90 + days for a page to naturally re-index, depending on various factors. We have allowed the time Buuteeq advised, and we are now taking action for our Clients."
Key attributes all of this to a bug, which has since been rectified, although he acknowledges that there is a latency period and that some of these unauthorized sites have not yet been de-indexed.
"They are staging sites and were not intended to be seen," Key says.
Wandari directory
Buuteeq built a directory called Wandari which included listings of B&Bs. Some of the B&B details came from owners' entries made for a free Buuteeq Facebook app and other data came from sources around the Web that Key of Buuteeq now admits were of "low quality." He emphasizes that Buuteeq didn't scrape B&Bs' own sites, but used "pervasive" content about them from around the Web.
"We didn't communicate enough about Wandari, how you can delete or edit your listing," Key says. "We should have done better and I apologized to the community."
There was much talk in the PAII forums that the duplicate content from the preview sites and Wandari would have a negative impact on B&B sites' SEO rankings.
Lisa Kolb, Acorn co-founder and president, says: "Some B&B's had duplicated Wandari listings (both scraped and fed by the Facebook app). Some had duplicate listings with multiple scraped listings, and some of those that did not participate in the free Facebook app did have wrong phone numbers as they were aparently scraped with the (1) digit playing havoc with the rest of the phone number."
Meta titles and descriptions
Kolb of Acorn charges that Buuteeq in December 2011 used meta titles and descriptions from Acorn and other businesses for Buuteeq landing pages "to capture Google placement."
Buuteeq also used Acorn content on the Buuteeq website in a bid to show how Buuteeq's digital marketing and SEO services are allegedly superior to Acorn's.
Buuteeq wrote: "Search engine optimization is one of the most important parts of internet bed and breakfast marketing. Instead of using sketchy 'black hat' SEO techniques, buuteeq optimizes your website for positive organic search results. We adhere to Google's guide on SEO and take a number of back-end steps covered in our SEO article that optimize your bed and breakfast website for search engines."
Key of Buuteeq is apologetic about some of the company's mistakes, adding that Buuteeq didn't do enough to communicate with B&B owners when issues first arose.
"By ignoring it," Key says, "it became like the Swift Boat campaign" against former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Key outlines the following steps taken to purge all of the "undesirable/unintended" pages from the Google index "ASAP" and to "restrict crawler access to all pages on buuteeq internal Web domains:"
- "Changed metatag no-follow, no-index logic;
- "Rendered across the board, explicit 404 error status code for all starters' published websites. Only paid customers can have valid content at the published websites; and
- "Moved Google Analaytics snippet to the top of the head section to facilitate automatic site ownership. By doing this, we can speed up the removal process on Google index using Google webmaster central tool."
Some would argue that Buuteeq may have been overly aggressive in its content-aggregation strategy as it tried to establish a base in a sector, the B&B industry, which isn't accustomed to such tech-led efforts.
And, what is Buuteeq's position in the B&B sector?
Key says Buuteeq has 3,000 lodging properties in 35 countries in its database and about one-third of these are B&Bs or inns. And of the 3,000 properties, about 20% are paying customers. Buuteeq's subscriber fees range from $199 to $999 per month, Key says.
But, Key argues that some of the posts in the PAII forum were "full frontal attacks" allegedly initiated by Acorn IS and other marketing agencies.
Kolb of Acorn counters:
Our clients, followers and associates have come to expect and trust us to provide full disclosure regarding any issue that has the potential to affect their business. Another web site depicting their business (content, photos, rates, etc.) online falls into this category. When the allotted time expired, as was indicated by Forest Key in his blog addressing the PAII forum, these 700 pages were still appearing in the Google cache and index.
Innkeepers wanted a solution. All of this could have been avoided if Buuteeq would not have been using data that belonged to Innkeepers who were not Buuteeq contracted clients. But in lieu of that, the next best solution would have been to remove the pages immediately instead of waiting on Google to re-index them, based on a published timeframe provided by Forest, that was optimistic at best.
What's really bothers Key is that he feels the dispute raised false arguments about SEO, which he feels is "a bad investment except for the biggest brands."
B&Bs are wasting money investing in SEO, where only the top three results really have meaning, Key argues.
"If you are jockeying for position in search result 17 versus 19, then that's really not moving the needle if you are jockeying for these lower spots," Key says.
He adds that it is "technically not correct" that duplicate content has negative SEO repercussions.
Some websites which have suffered from Google's Panda updates, however, may not concur.
But, B&B owners likely would argue that they are the ones who should be making the decisions about how to use their own content.
In one instance, Key concedes that Buuteeq "inappropriately copied and pasted" the text from an Authentic Bed and Breakfasts association page onto the website page of a Buuteeq customer's webpage.
"It was a good teachable moment for us a young technology company that is growing," Key says, pointing to a staff meeting outlining best practices.