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Posted by | Posted 4 hours, 35 minutes ago:
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I’m afraid that, in this case, you are mistaken. The case is not about Mathew Brown (alias “Lord Matt”) stating negative views about the SEO techniques used by Writers Promote, however rude and hectoring his language may have been. After all, the details of search engine optimisation techniques are hardly a matter for the courts.
The case to be answered is that Mathew Brown libelled Dr Notley, in that Mr Brown alleged that Dr Notley lied to members of Writers Promote about receiving money for advertising. These allegations are false, and extremely damaging to Dr Notley, an honest businessman, and Mr Brown will fail in his defence because the truth of these matters is capable of independent audit.
However, while sharing your views about the importance of retaining an independent voice, you do not need to be concerned in this instance. The removal of the offending article(s) will have no effect on any bloggers’ right to express their views about businesses or governments, so long as they refrain from defamatory falsehoods, which has always been the case, and I hope will always remain so. I assume you would not support anyone’s right to publicly defame you, me or anyone else with false allegations.
You may publish these remarks if you publish them in full and without editing or interjections.
As I run this community I am just going to point you to 2 links
Disgraceful keyword stuffing and hidden links
web.archive.org/web/20070124002716/http://writersp...
(I do have a copy saved)
si3429 of 2006
www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2006/uksi_20063429_en.pdf
Garth,
You should reread what LordMatt wrote. He did not say Writers Promote received money for advertising. This can be discovered by those who read Matt's post and have reading skills above those normally achieved by 14 year olds in the US.
If your libel claim is based on the idea that he said money was transferred, you will fail.
Thank you for your comment, Lucia. I'm glad that the case for libel will be decided under the jurisdiction of the laws of England, not based on the opinion of a 14-year-old American schoolgirl. I cannot discuss this case further here. Let's leave it to the courts to decide.
Garth,
I assume the average adult in England has better reading comprehension than a schoolgirl in the US. I'm pretty sure that even in England, one must actually say, post or write something before it can be held against them in a defamation suit.
Matt didn't say what you claim, so if that claim you posted here is the basis for your suit, you will lose.
Andy - do me a favour. You seem to be in a position to influence Mathew Brown (aka Lord Matt). Please, for his own sake, suggest that he gets properly qualified legal advice. Thanks for your help.
I will point him in the direction of this thread, but I will also give you some advise on how things normally work on the internet.
If bloggers get taken to court over something, it is likely to be written about by other bloggers who will quite naturally present whatever evidence they can find.
They wouldn't be making any accusations, they would just be reporting facts.
One example is the long running drama with SEOBook.com
Based upon the evidence I have seen, Matt didn't make any false statements, but that doesn't really matter.
Matt has a relatively low authority blog, so he won't be dominating the search results for a post with a company or website name in it.
Currently the easiest way to handle this reputation management isn't issuing a takedown notice, but accepting it for the good advise (which I notice has been used), and then working on reputation management and link building.
As an example, a search on Google for Andy Beard generally say nice things about me and I am fortunate that people have written nice things in general.
One of my blogging friends not too long ago nofollowed a lik to one of my articles, because (and he told his audience) he strongly disagreed with what I proposed.
If this court case is your own attempt at linkbait, an attempt to raise your own profile, it might succeed in making your company a household name, or at least a blogging household name, but unfortunately none of the mentions will proclaim how good your writing is, it will all have negative connotations about you taking a blogger to court for giving you good advise.
There would be some benefit to it, raising awareness for si3429 of 2006 and how that shackles online marketers especially those using pseudonyms.
The negative side is that you would end up with a reputation management crisis that most good SEOs would have a nightmare trying to repair.
Currently even a quoted search for "Writers Promote" doesn't pick up any of the discussion surrounding this situation, you have to remove the space which is really a misspelling.
The thing that really needs fixing is name based searches, but that would actually be very easy to fix.
I am going to point Matt in the direction of this thread, but at the same time my advise would be to hire a specialist in reputation management such as Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com (who almost daily accuses major corporations of deception and bad practice quite openly) on how to fix your current problem without making it worse.
Thank you for your comments Andy. Maybe when the dust has settled we can continue this discussion but, for obvious reasons, I cannot discuss the details of this case here. It is sufficient that I would not be proceeding without expert legal advice. For the moment, I just don't want Mr Brown to walk into this situation without having himself taken properly qualified legal advice, which, based on his rather “unusual” letter to my solicitors, he has not yet done. That would be very foolish of him, and not in either of our interests.
Your advice to me does sound a bit as if you're saying that, even if you agree that Mr Brown made false and defamatory statements, I should be frightened of doing anything about it. Surely you didn't mean that?
Lets take a hypothetical case. What would be your advice to an honest businessman (1) whose integrity is falsely impugned in some irresponsible persons blog? And (2) where the blogger has ensured that the search engines will display this falsehood under all variations of the businessmans name, company or private role, whether relevant to the case or not, apparently intended to cause maximum damage. And (3) when the blogger responds to any remonstration from the businessman, by lampooning and further defaming that businessman?
What would you advise that unfortunate businessman to do?
Garth,
Many, many reputation managers would have advised you to absolutely, positively avoid a suit which you seem to have lodged after one post appeared!
The main reason Matt's story is moving up in the search engine ranks is because you are suing him, which is causing bloggers to cover the story and link to Matt's blog and to that post in particular. During the course of the suit, more stories will appear. In the unlikely event you win your suit, those other stories will still exist.
The more stories there are, the worse for you. You may think the court case is focused on some narrow ground that you may be able to win. (And if Matt doesn't hire attorneys, then yes, you could win even though your case looks pathetic. So, yes, Matt should hire attorneys.)
But say Matt doesn't hire an attorney, and ends up losing due to an entirely incompetent defense. Will that help you? No.
I mean, read the stories: Already, you have people here pointing out that you were offering to promote writers by providing servral web services. However, you were using "promotional" techniques that were bound to blacklist them with search engines. (EG. Keyword stuffing.)
They will point out that WritersPromote itself appeared to have zero traffic which suggests you aren't competent at promoting anything. (Alexa rank over 2 million, with a few upticks only as a result of Matt's story.)
Andy's also suggesting that it appears you do have trouble with undisclosed affiliations and if I understand Andy correctly, this lack of disclosure may well violate some sort of UK business regulations. (But maybe would be ok in the US.) If true, this would suggest you may not understand the regulations that bind the writers you advise and might get them in legal hot water should they use aliases inappropriately.
So, basically, there will be stories out there suggesting the basics services you provide are valueless or harmful to your clients.
At that point, you may realize that what you really need to do is hire someone who actually knows SEO and create content associated with your name that will push the other stories down in the search engines. But, at that point, it will also be difficult to push them down because there will be so many stories.
Since you are a writer, you might want to start a blog right now. You could probably easily craft content that is interesting to your subscribers, attract new customers and even help promote your customers.
You could also offer your subscribers blogging platforms instead of static web pages. If you play your cards right, they will mention you and generate links for you.
With an unusual name like "Garth Notly" you could probably even dominate the SERPS for your name! Just cut out all that keyword stuffing and write some good publicly accessible content. Learn how to let the search engines crawl your forums and well... basically learn how to promote something on the web!