Senior Living Map: Steinar Skipsnes aka Sarah Hanson aka Katie SCAM Alert! Senior Living Map a Hoax! Sarah Hanson fictious Internet
First off, My name is James and I run the website for a local assisted living facility in the Florida.
I recently received an email from an unknown source from a girl named Katie Smith from Senior Living Map. The email stated the following:
"Hi, the update has been made.
Your facility is now listed as one of our "Featured Facilities" and all visitors to Senior Living Map interested in your facility will now be sent directly to your website.
Please let me know where on your facility's website, you've added a link to Senior Living Map.
In case you haven't added a link yet, just a reminder that something simple like "We're listed on Senior Living Map" would work.
Thanks,
Katie"
The problem with this is, we never listed our retirement community on this web directory and they're claiming that an update has been made on something we did NOT initiate. I figured they were looking for some link juice and using old school, but still effective black hat SEO tricks to boost up the authority on their domain. So we ignored it especially since the name is so generic and fake looking, "Katie Smith". This isn't unusual in the email SPAM world.
4 days later we received another demanding and threating follow up email from Katie.
"Hi, could you please tell me where you added a link to Senior Living Map?
I just visited your facility's website and was unable to locate it.
You can visit Senior Living Map (www.seniorlivingmap.org) to see that we've added a link to direct visitors to your website. We've also listed you as one of our "Featured Facilities".
We will continue to do so indefinitely at no cost, as long as you have a link on your website to Senior Living Map.
Thank you,
Katie"
Maybe demanding and threating aren't the right terms, but blackmail is. Here's the translation to the email above. Link back to our website or else we are going to charge you money or delete your listing.
Now you may be wondering, why does this company called Senior Living Map want a back link so bad? Well bottom line is, it's a "black-hat SEO" trick to boost the web visiability on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. They are using these tatics and sending mass B.S. emails to hundreds of retirement and assisted living homes demanding links back to their website.
A side note about Search Engine Optimzation aka SEO: Having "relevent" backlinks is supposed to be good SEO tactics.
Fake Katie pitches the idea as they are doing you a favor, but they aren't. This website has no content and nothing valueable to bring to the table. In a real world, a featured listing would normally have an expanded business listing with great insight about the community. Their website is no different than using Google Maps and searching for "retirement home" or "Assisted Living Facility".
Where it really starts to get disgusting and spammy is when you do research on the actual founder of this company. When you search around the web and try to find infomation about the founder of this Senior Living Map SCAM, you'll read a heart touching story about a 19 year old girl named, Sarah Hanson. This fictuous story claims that FAKE Sarah Hanson has a hard time finding an assisted living home for her grandmother and decided to launch Senior Living Map. Aparetly FAKE Sarah Hanson touched the heart in some angel investment directories and FAKE Sarah received some funding for this startup. This is at least what the stories claim. I felt this was their trust building tactic.
The truth is, Sarah Hanson isn't real at all and this story is made up by a Seattle based indiviual name, Steinar Skipsnes. We don't even know if Steinar is even a real person. Steinar could also be FAKE. The scam artist, Steinar, does though in fact run a blog and has admitted to making the story up. He made up a story because he said it is too hard to stand out in front of other startups and get PR coverage. Apartrently Skipsnes thinks cutting corners in life to get ahead without doing real hard work is the best way. This is in fact a criminal mind way of thinking. This is in fact another s****.>
The bottom line, Steinar Skipsnes does NOT care about seniors. What he cares about is getting "backlinks" from popular media sources and relevant sources to dominate search engine visability. This is revealed by the FAKE PR articles (included links below) and email SPAM email that we received from their company. Steinar is gaming a system (Search Engines) and the most logical reason is to auction off the domain in the future to the highest bidder after gaining top rankings.