RipOff Report Responds: You Be the Judge

Welcome to another edition of Legal Monday! Some of you may recall my post from last week, The Anatomy of A RipOff Report Lawsuit, in which I attempted to illuminate the legal issues surrounding the controversial site RipOffReport.com.

I invited Mr. Thomas B. Duffy, one of RipOff Report’s attorneys, to contact me regarding last week’s post with any corrections, feedback, documents, or missed cases that he thought might be helpful. I am very grateful to him for taking me up on my offer and contacting me last week. The phone call lasted for more than an hour. For today’s Legal Monday, I want to summarize five of Mr. Duffy’s responses:

1. The Post Contained a Factual Error
2. The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because Many People Who Write RipOff Reports Understand SEO
3. The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because That is How Uneducated People Write When They Are Really Upset
4. RipOff Report’s Technical People Indicate That the Site is Not Violating Google’s Guidelines
5. Ed Magedson Proved His Innocence When He Stated He Could Not Have Authored the RipOff Reports Because He Lives in Arizona and the Alleged Defamatory Reports Have IP Addresses from All Over the Country

RipOff Report has been much discussed lately and some may feel that the topic is tired. Regardless, I felt I would be remiss if I did not share some of RipOff Report’s counter-arguments and comments. For those of you who are utterly bored of RipOff Report, I promise to move on next week.

During our conversation, Mr. Duffy spontaneously brought up the issue of keyword-stuffed titles. (For examples of seemingly keyword stuffed title tags, look here and here.) He explained that the reason it appears that the titles have been optimized is because they are, but not by RipOff Report. Instead, Duffy claimed that many people understand SEO and purposefully used SEO techniques in their titles to improve rankings.

I’m not sure what to say about this. Really? Are there hundreds of SEOs completing RipOff Reports? Do we buy this as a community?

3. The Titles Appear to Be Keyword Stuffed Because That is How Uneducated People Write When They Are Really Upset

At other points in the conversation and without prompting, Mr. Duffy suggested an alternate explanation for the seemingly keyword stuffed title tags: That is just how uneducated people write when they are very upset. According to Duffy, these “poorly educated” people get so upset that they “can’t put a sentence together.”

While I agree that the U.S. education system has its faults, I can’t bring myself to agree with Mr. Duffy here. “Russ Whitey [sic] Education Group Scam Rip Off Fraud Misrepresentation Deceptive trade practices Securities and Exchange Russ Whitney Foreclosure Wealth Intelligence Academy Law Suit/ Focus On Foreclosure Cape Coral Florida” doesn’t look to me like a poorly educated person who is so upset they can’t form a sentence. “Misrepresentation” is a rather large word for the uneducated masses. Also, I find the different spellings of “Whitney” to be highly suspect.

Before this goes any further, I also want to be clear that none of the Complaints I have seen suggest that RipOff Report employees generate all the reports. In fact, I think it is safe to assume even those who are suing RipOff Report agree that most reports are written by the masses. Thus, there are certainly many, many counter-examples of perfectly reasonable, albeit inarticulately phrased title tags.

And then there are those that repeat the company name and the word “internet.” Is this what they’re teaching in our public schools? To repeat words for emphasis when angry? To repeat words for emphasis when angry?

(Okay. That was a wee little joke. Couldn’t resist.)

4. RipOff Report’s Technical People Indicate That the Site is Not Violating Google’s Guidelines

Again spontaneously, Mr. Duffy volunteered the fact that RipOff Report’s “technical people” had determined that the site was not violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. As proof of RipOff Report’s compliance, he offers the fact that “We’re [RipOff Report] still on top.”

I am a not an expert in technology. I just work in a community with more than its fair share of technology experts. Is RipOff Report violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? According to people that I trust about this kind of thing, the answer is “yes.”

I linked to his post last week because Chris Bennett did an excellent job of demonstrating the ways RipOff Report fails to comply with Google’s guidelines. In summary, Mr. Bennett points directly to:

• the aforementioned use of keyword stuffing
• the site’s failure to use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines
• the multiple domains and subdomains (w3.ripoffreport.com and badbusinessbureau.com) with substantially duplicate content
• the pages loaded with irrelevant keywords

Your very own Mr. Rand Fishkin also identified a few doozies:

• It appears that the URL – www.ripoffreport.com/lists/ – is being cloaked (though it doesn’t seem to necessarily be malicious cloaking). Try searching for Rip Off Report at Google and that’s the second result, but unless you change your user agent to Googlebot, it forwards you to http://www.ripoffreport.com/lists/1/default1442.htm (or something similar).
• The site also sells paid link advertising and fails to nofollow the links.
• MSN/Live has clearly banned the site and will no longer index it, while Yahoo! has simply severely limited its ranking ability. (When 2/3 engines think a site’s spamming, that’s a pretty good signal that something’s wrong.)

5. Ed Magedson Proved His Innocence When He Stated He Could Not Have Authored the RipOff Reports Because He Lives in Arizona and the Alleged Defamatory Reports Have IP Addresses from All Over the Country

Mr. Duffy stated repeatedly that Mr. Magedson had ‘proven’ he was not the author of any RipOff Reports, Titles, or Rebuttals. There is a sworn statement, according to Mr. Duffy, in which Mr. Magedson proves he couldn’t have authored certain RipOff Reports because the author’s IP address was in Texas and Ed lives in Arizona.

I did not find a statement by Ed Magedson that said this exactly. I did, however, find a couple statements in which RipOff Report attempts to prove its innocence by revealing the author’s IP address and then swearing that it doesn’t match the IP addresses belonging to the company or to Mr. Magedson. Ergo, RipOff Report did not author or change the Reports. One is a sworn statement by Ed Magedson. The other is a sworn statement by a long-time technology consultant for RipOff Report, Ben Smith.

There is nothing inviolate about an IP address. I am concerned that Judges and perhaps most attorneys might give this evidence more than its proper weight. Thus, for any non-techies who may be reading, I asked our CTO, Jeff Pollard, to explain to me how IP addresses work and how easy it would be to get an alternate IP address for your home or business computer. Here is Jeff’s response:

An IP address identifies a network connection to the internet – but it does not identify a specific computer.  For instance, as far as the internet is concerned, all actions taken from our office internet connection – no matter which individual computer did it – are from the same IP address.  So, even though Jane’s computer could be commenting on SEOmoz and my laptop is browsing cnn.com, both are making requests under the same IP address.

And that isn’t to say that IPs can’t be changed or spoofed.  You can use a proxy or VPN to mask your IP address and make it look like it’s coming from somewhere else, or if your ISP assigns you a dynamic IP (like our office currently has) vs a static IP, your IP address changes as often as you restart your router (or if your ISP feels like it).

So, in general, for the casual internet browser, their IP address does an OK job identifying them.  But if you want to spoof your IP or just use one not associated with your home or office, it’s not that hard at all.  It can be as simple as restarting your router, using any number of proxy services, or even just go down to your nearest Tully’s and use the free WiFi.

I am an attorney and not a technologist. That’s why I rely on geniuses like Mr. Pollard. You, my readers, are much more tech savvy than I am. Thus, you are more than capable of exercising your independent judgment regarding how effectively the “Not-Our-IP-Address Defense” exonerates RipOff Report.

I don’t know if Mr. Duffy was representing his own views or RipOff Report’s views when he told me these things on the phone. I make no assumptions.

I do know that on several occasions during the course of the phone call, Duffy informed me that Magedson was upset, talking to his “litigators,” and thinking about suing the SEO community for “ganging up” on him. While he did not go into detail, Duffy hinted that Magedson may try and bring some kind of antitrust lawsuit against everyone who has participated in the recent online discussions about RipOff Report.

I sincerely hope that this was just bluster. An antitrust suit would be ill conceived and frivolous. The SEO community has not called for a boycott, shared confidential information, refused to deal, or engaged in monopolizing behavior. Most importantly, because SEOs do not compete with RipOff Report, antitrust laws are inapplicable. To the contrary, I suspect that RipOff Report generates a great deal of business for SEOs by creating negative rankings that require reputation management services. Thus, the collective outcry of the community could be viewed as altruism at its finest.

As always, I thank you for your readership. I hope that the threat of a lawsuit will not have a chilling effect on comments.

Very truly yours,
Sarah