A friend has received a couple of calls from the search engine RedZ trying to get him to purchase advertising on their search engine. They point to the large amounts of traffic coming to his site from the search engine. Sure enough, it sends a lot of referring traffic, but my friend was smart enough to recognize in analytics that all of the traffic had a 90%+ bounce rate with an average time on site of about 1 second, leading him to believe that RedZ has an automated program to trigger site visit counts like this before they make a sales call.
Here is another complaint about RedZ: http://www.trafficflowseo.com/2009/07/seeing-redz-story-of-click-fraud-and.html
Website: www.redz.com
SEO FAIL!
-SEO Fail Blog
#1 by Mike Wilton at March 26th, 2010
Redz has been around for some time now. A lot of clients at the last company I worked for were getting hit up quite a bit. They not only use bots to hit the site, they also provide a browser plugin that will put your site at the top of the SERPs leading you to believe you are a top ranking site. Sadly on any other computer you’re probably nowhere to be found.
#2 by Florian Weber at March 30th, 2010
I knew that their marketing is let’s say a bit fishy, but this kind of frauf gives the whole thing a totally new dimension…shocking!
#3 by Mark Aaron Murnahan at April 28th, 2010
It sounds a bit like the stories you hear about Yelp. Well, the good news is that they have a damn fine looking zebra.
#4 by fetetet at April 29th, 2010
Ooooh.. รถ
#5 by Lisa at June 4th, 2010
Seems that the red zebra isn’t too smart either. Go on their website and do a search for ‘redz search engine’ and two of the three top results are click fraud warning blogs or sites discussing what a scam they are.
I got a call from them today as well, spent some time talking to the rep, asked all the right questions to which I had the answers already (backed up by google adwords tool) and got all the wrong answers from them. I told them I needed time to think about it and would call them back. In the meantime my website is listed at top spot which they did for demo purposes, so I’ll gladly take any free traffic they can send me. Should be about 300 orders coming in with the next 15 minutes or so - based on what they tried to make me believe.