Complaint Review: Internet Advancement

We are a small family run company and we first contacted Internet Advancement in November 2006 by phone. During the phone call I was taken to several websites that had high rankings for particular keywords that IAI claimed were client of theirs. Using Internet Explorer IAI showed me the Meta Tags for these sites claiming that they were examples of IAI's work. They also claimed that they would do many other activities in order to obtain a first page ranking on the keywords that they would choose after a professional analysis of my website. (NOTE: I have these in writing if anyone is interested)

Being new to marketing on the internet and new to search engine optimization, these results seemed quite impressive and they gave the appearance of a professional consulting firm with extensive knowledge in SEO. After a few days of considering their programs I decided to give them an opportunity to professionally analyze my website and optimize it as IAI deemed appropriate based on its analysis.

They chose a broad set of keywords, some of which I thought were not necessarily the best to describe my website. But I relented because they were the experts and I was the novice.

Well to make a long story short they never delivered on any of their promises. When I complained that my rankings were falling instead of increasing they attempted to place the blame on me claiming I had made changes to the website that eliminated their customizations causing the rankings to fall. This of course was a pure fabrication on their part. With each complaint I made they responded by stating that they would increase their submissions to the search engines and that would fix the low rankings.

Of course, this didn't help my site rankings at all. Finally after almost a year of suffering from consistently horrible rankings and paying close to $1,000 I finally fired IAI out of frustration with their inexcusable performance. In fact at the time I fired them they had managed to get ZERO keywords ranked with Google.

The most bizarre aspect of this sad example of SEO expertise is that after I fired them and they stopped whatever they were doing on my sites behalf to increase my rankings, my rankings began to rebound and to return to the previous IAI levels. So whatever IAI was doing to promote my site was, in fact, hindering my sites rankings!

IAI is far from a professional SEO consulting firm. They are a rip-off and a waste of time to deal with. I highly recommend that you stay away from this company.

David
Barboursville, Virginia
U.S.A.