Complaint Review: Higher Visibility

There has been a settlement reached with our former client regarding the lawsuit we had filed against them. This matter is considered closed.

I would like to retract my comments from before and if Ripoffreport.com would let me remove them I would. I was very upset at the time of the postings , but after further reflection I relize a lot of it was a misunderstanding for both parites. I am happy to report that everything has been resolved to both of our satisfaction and even though we are parting ways, I wish the Highervisibility team the best of luck in their future endevours.

Class Action Lawsuit against HigherVisibility LLC

I wanted to thank all the companies and agencies that have already reached out to us so far with their claims against HigherVisibility LLC and their unfair practices. Our attorneys are gathering additional information from these company’s and are considering a class action lawsuit against HigherVisibility LLC,.

We encourage everyone else that feels that they have been ripped off by HigherVisibility to contact us and we will forward your claim to our attorneys to take the matter to court.

We have forced the lawsuit against HigherVisibility into mandatory arbitration and are gathering information from additional sources.   

 First of all, Higher Visibility did not file a lawsuit until we made them file it, they simply filed a motion that they might file one, we demanded that they file a suit so that we may file a vigorous counter suit against them for all the damages to our site. They are a group of sleezy car lot sales man that hide behind their phones and computers. They also use a collection agency that calls itself a bank and says they fund higher visibility(whatever that’s supposed to mean?!?) and that they will take no prisoners.

Below you will find the emails that we sent to them regarding our concerns over and over again. They either never responded to them or directed the problem to the “next sales rep”.

Also the facts that they point out regarding time is somewhat true, we did start on a local campaign but only decided to try a national one because they told us we weren’t getting the results on our site since we were only doing it on a local level. They basically sold us on the fact that we weren’t going to see any results unless we went big on a national level. Boy did we get fooled 

Their claim regarding 3% to 31% is just garbage, they can make up any number they want to. I will try to attach the actual report to this claim if I can, if not you can contact me at any time, I will gladly provide them. You will see how we tanked on almost every single keyword.

Our team of attorneys is one of the biggest and oldest in the Northwest. We will fight their claim of $22,000 in court vigorously, we will also in turn file a counter claim for all damages. We have been in business a long time and will not be allowed to be bullied around.

Please review all the emails below, we have nothing to hide.

This was the last email we sent to their collections department asking them to respond several times. They failed to do so.

Again as per my voicemail. Please respond to our requests and voicemails.

From: Nik Iyerusalimets
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 10:34 PM
To: John Matthews (john@unitedfidelityinc.com)
Subject: FW: HighVisibility -VS- A.H.R. ( Advanced Hair Restoration) Balance: $ 4900.00

Please read below

From: Alex Iyerusalimets
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 1:26 PM
To: Nik Iyerusalimets
Subject: RE: HighVisibility -VS- A.H.R. ( Advanced Hair Restoration) Balance: $ 4900.00

Attached is a pdf (highervisibility review). Highlighted are the items that they have not provided. The X’s show the crucial items. 3 of the 4 main elements have not been provided at all. Moreover, the results are obviously not showing, we are ranked very poorly throughout and haven’t experienced any benefit since we started with them. Additionally, they made a comment that suggested fishy seo practices as evidenced in an email response to me. Attached is a baseline report (April) showing our initial search engine standings. Also, attached is the last report we received in August. As the reports show, the rankings have dropped substantially and have been dropping or showing no improvement month after month.

The links they provided were very questionable to search engines, not properly spun(written), and as such have resulted in search engines devaluing our pages. In fact, one of our most popular and important pages: http://www.advancedhairrestoration.com/neograft-vs-traditional.php, used to rank #20 for the search term “Neograft”, but has now been clearly penalized by Google and cannot be found under ANY search term in the top 100. This is one of the pages that HigherVisibility built links to. This negative linking building strategy has caused us harm rather than good. If anything, a full REFUND of all charges is in order.

From: Nik Iyerusalimets
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:51 PM
To: 'John Matthews'
Subject: RE: HighVisibility -VS- A.H.R. ( Advanced Hair Restoration) Balance: $ 4900.00

John, I have spoken to my operations department. They are preparing a response regarding the issues at hand. From speaking with them briefly they had made it known that large portions of “Higher Visibility’s” obligations were not met as well as the fact that the majority of the SEO was performed by “BOT” programs and tactics that resulted in us losing our rankings with the major search engines. I will have the full report as soon as I receive the line items. Thank You

From: John Matthews [mailto:john@unitedfidelityinc.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:05 PM
To: Nik Iyerusalimets
Subject: Re: HighVisibility -VS- A.H.R. ( Advanced Hair Restoration) Balance: $ 4900.00

Dear Mr. Iyerusalimets,

In accordance with our telephone conversation of recent date this email will serve to confirm that we represent

"HigherVisibilty" in regards to the above outstanding balance. Herewith this email is the attached documentation to support our clients claims. Circumventing our firm and contacting our client directly will simply slow down this process and is not recommended as we are the firm that will address the case. It is our intention to try to resolve this matter voluntarily to avoid the additional costs associated with enforcing this claim. Please contact our firm via telephone or email.

Respectfully Submitted, 

John Matthews

Legal Department

UNITED FIDELITY

3699 NE Renar Avenue

Jensen Beach, FL. 34957

Phone: 800-358-8103 x 17

Fax: 772-600-0281

john@unitedfidelityinc.com

From us again

As per my IT team, Please review we need to come to a conclusion.

From: Alex Iyerusalimets
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 2:19 PM
To: Nik Iyerusalimets
Subject: RE: highervisablity

Last I heard they threatened to send to collections. Attached is a pdf. Highlighted are the items that they have not provided, or were not relevant/no value for us. The X’s show the crucial items. 3 of the 4 main elements have not been provided. They say that they are getting to them, but provided them a year later is not as useful to us a providing them early. Furthermore, the results are obviously not showing, we are ranked very poorly throughout and haven’t experienced any benefit since we started with them. Lastly, they made a comment that suggested fishy seo practices as evidenced in her email to me below. I emailed her my reponse below but she never got back to me.

From: Iyerusalimets
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2012 9:37 AM
To: Rebecca McCraw [mailto:rebecca@highervisibility.com]
Subject: RE: HigherVisibility Account Manager

Thanks.  I understand that directory submissions are useful in some respects. However, I am under the impression that their usefulness is very limited in that, while numerous, the individual links have very little if any page value. Your comment raises my concern that the blog posts and social bookmarks will also be of a similar nature. While eventually after a long time this may yield a decent result, this computer automated approach doesn’t seem like a quality, tailored seo. My understanding is that resourceful articles and links from high ranked pages are the most authorative and effective and thought that those would constitute a significant portion of the seo work provided. The earlier we can get high quality links versus just directory links obviously the much better result.

Thanks,

Alex

Rebecca, please review the report we are almost down in every single category for Google. I will have our team review this for me while I'm out sick and get back to you with more details. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 31, 2012, at 10:03 AM, "Rebecca McCraw" <rebecca@highervisibility.com> wrote:

Hi Nik,

Attached you will find the Monthly keyword ranking report which will show the most recent movement on your rankings.

Rebecca, looking at the results this is not good. The keywords that are up are all almost irrelevant to our business and the keywords that we asked to focus on are either down or have no movement. Please explain.  

From: Rebecca McCraw [mailto:rebecca@highervisibility.com]
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 3:10 PM
To: Nik Iyerusalimets
Subject: HigherVisibility Monthly Reporting

Hi Nik,

Attached you will find the Monthly keyword ranking report which will show the most recent movement on your rankings. We are seeing some fluctuation these fluctuations are due to a change in algorithm across the board primarily in yahoo and Bing however the fluctuations over all are slight however Google is indicative of what will be seen in yahoo and Bing once their changes have been flushed out. We are currently working on extensive link building which should do nothing but increase rankings and the authority of the website. If you would like to set up a time to go over this report or address any questions you may have I am more than happy to set up a day and time that is best for you.

Thanks so much!             

As you can see we did all we could to let them try to fix it, they failed, now they want to charge us for work they did not do. Please don’t waste your money, find a reputable SEO company out their instead of this one. They have made this personal, our entire team of physicians and their attorneys will fight this vigorously.

Our former client, Advanced Hair Restoration is the party making these claims. Below is a timeline of facts surrounding these "claims". I am going to provide as many details as possible, but we do have a pending lawsuit against the defendant (Advanced Hair Restoration). There are many more details I would love to share, but can't at his time.

1. The client originally signed a contract for a local campaign for Advanced Hair Seattle.

2. The client was experiencing an increase in rankings, but only for local keywords. The client made the decision to focus on broader nationally focused keywords. We advised the client that this was outside the scope of our original agreement and that they would have to enter into a new agreement for us to begin work on this campaign.

3. At the client's request we terminated their old agreement and they went ahead and signed a new contract (April 2012).

4. When the new campaign began they decided that they wanted a new website focused on a national audience. They made the decision to redirect their old local based website to the new nationally focused website. At that time we advised them that their local focused keywords may be impacted and the client was comfortable with that.

5. We began onpage work for the new website in April of 2012 and in September of 2012 we notified the client that they were in breach of contract for non-payment and we sent them over to collections.

6. In May 2012 their website had 3% visibility in Google (It was a new website) and by the end of August 2012 they had 31% visibility. We provide ALL clients with monthly reporting (so they have these numbers), and actually all clients now have access to daily reporting for their campaigns. We discontinued work at the end of August because of non-payment.

7. The defendant's statement of "60 days into the process we noticed that we had dropped organic ranking" does not correlate with the known facts as they were working with us for much longer and went from 3% to 31% visibility which is clearly not a drop in rankings.

8. The statement from the defendant of "We hired an outside firm to report the work performed by HigherVisibility, they came back with an alarming report. They notified us that the following services were not performed as per contract" is an inaccurate and very misleading statement. Our contract with the defendant included certain services that were to be completed in a 12 month agreement. Due to non-payment we discontinued work at the end of August 2012, only 4 months into the campaign. We had significant work completed on these services, but obviously due to the work stoppage not everything on a 12 month agreement would be completed. Also many of the items that the defendant refers to in their claims "no web design, conversion tracking, social bookmarking icons, etc.." are optional items that are at the client's request.

9. The defendant's statement of "They also did not perform on the the number of keywords as per contract.", is also very misleading. Our contract with them and most clients state that we will optimized and track UP TO 150 keywords. Every client is provided a listing of keywords that we are recommending to target (Included in the Meta document). The client agrees to this before we make any changes live.

10. The defendant's statement of "We contacted Google to investigate why we had dropped organically. We have friends within Google that researched it and gave us a report." is very misleading as well. Common knowledge is that you can't call up Google and ask them why your rankings are down. Reconsideration requests are the method that would have to be used if you feel that your website is penalized. Google isn't going to be offering up much information and definitely not a report. The thought of "friends that work at Google" looking into it is also extremely unlikely. The search engineers at Google aren't even allow to talk to Google executives outside of the web spam team about the algorithm, let alone "friends". It would be hard to imagine them breaching confidentiality. If this were the case, every SEO firm would have a "Google" friend, which I can tell you is not the case. It is a black box atmosphere over at Google. With that being said, another thing that throws this claim into question is that their rankings had INCREASED and not dropped. 3% visibility to 31% visibility in those 4 months. The defendant has not produced any report from Google since we have filed a lawsuit.

11. The defendant's statement of "Turns out that they have been using "BOTS" to randomly create false links and and generating fake back-links." is false. We HAVE NOT and WILL NOT use "BOTS" such as Xrumer or Scrapebox to generate backlinks. The only software that we use for link building for certain submission processes to keep track of what has been built for a campaign. If we had been building these types of links the defendant would have received a unnatural links warning from Google, which did not happen. They had since hired another firm, one of which I presume is cheaper in cost. We are not the cheapest firm around, but we stand by our work.

12. The defendant's statement of "We contacted our attorneys to demand our money back. They countered with a lawsuit for around $22,000 for the services they did not perform but rather tried to collect on." is false. We had no contact from their attorneys until we had taken them to collections. We did not "counter" with $22,000, because there was no offer to settle from the defendant. We filed a lawsuit seeking what was rightfully owed as per the contract that they signed with us.

13. The defendant's claims surfaced after we had taken them to collections for non-payment, in what we believe is an attempt to be relieved of their financial obligations for the work that we performed.

14. After a failure to reach any settlement with the client through collections, with the help of our collections agency we filed a lawsuit in the State of Washington against the defendant seeking damages for breach of contract.

15. A few weeks after we filed a lawsuit against the defendant, these claims were published on Rip off report and not before then.