What's a RedZee Options

[tpiddy]

if anyone has any more information on redzee referral spamming please continue to post here, this not too far off considering their business practices and how aggresively they sell ads.

they also have a toolbar that merges ads into google, yahoo and msn's natural listings. i have an article about redzee's toolbar here.

if you have heard of linkpositions network, this is the same company.

[bragadocchio]

Hi tpiddy,

Welcome to the forums.

It's nice to uncover another blog about search to add to my RSS aggregator.

I think that there's some reason to feel skeptical about a meta search engine that won't reveal the sources of its information, and that offers a toolbar that it doesn't tell you much about, while also offering a payperclick program.


This is a quote from a site that shares the Same street address and suite number as RedZee:

No pay per click to worry about!  Your site listing rotates the top three spots in the natural listing area!

Source: http://linkpositions.com/services.html

The screenshots that they provide make it clear that the results are part of the natural results shown in Google.


Or, from another site that hosts a company that shares the same street address and suite number as RedZee comes this statement, along with a screenshot of a banner advertisement placed above search results at Google:

Your Website actually opens in the results!. Now that's visibility!  

http://www.windowpositions.com/services.html

The windowsposition site mentions the following:

 The revolution has begun.  Introducing Search Engine Data Merging™ !

Source: http://www.windowpositions.com/networkuserbase.html


Curious, I searched for what they might mean by "search engine data mining." This article on Mondaq gave an intersting answer:

United States: Advertising Scam "Search Engine Data Merging"
http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articlei...2&lastestnews=1

added: (sorry about the requirement to login to read the article. When I found it on Google the first time, I wasn't required to do so.)

added more: The same article can be found here: http://professionalwebservices.blogspot.co...ngine-data.html

[whitemark]

Thanks for the info tpiddy, Bill.

[nridge]

Just checking in to see if anyone has experienced trouble with Redzee and their Google pagerank. I just got hooked into their program in late september. Sales were going great. Then died on October 1. Just found out our links are now not registered with Yahoo. Our pagerank dropped from 4 > 3. Was wondering if redzee had anything to do with this?

[kds20]

Redzee would not change your natural page ranking in any of the search engines. So you know the thumbnails are from alexa.com

[nridge]

You sound like the Redzee sales rep. What is your connection to Redzee?

[kds20]

i used to be a resseller for them

[sanity]

Thought I'd follow up on this.

I checked the raw logs as Whitemark suggested and RedZee are not browsing the site at all. They hit the homepage and they go.

They seem to get their "search results" from the Google AdWords listings and add the image from Alexa. Whilst we're not paying for the clicks it really distorts our analysis.

Now I just have to work out the best way to filter all their IP's. :roll:

[SisterSledge]

Since I usually lurk and don't post much, it was a surprise to me that I wasn't registered here when I tried to post a moment ago...I"ve been popping in here for a long time...Thanks to everyone for all the great tips and info I've picked up along the way. I feel ashamed for not posting thanks sooner and wish I could reciprocate with helpful info of my own, but I'm always a day late and a dollar short...

Which, BTW, is my reason for posting today. I was **** a bit of research into Redzee and found the info posted here to be the most relevant over anywhere else and wanted to express my appreciation - especially to Sanity for coming back with confirmation of questionable practices by Redzee from her raw log results.

[sanity]

Welcome to Cre8asite SisterSledge!

It's always nice to have a member delurk.

I'm glad the information was helpful to you.

[iamhrh]

Just thought I'd add my 2 cents, We've been contacted on a near daily basis from sales reps from redzee and linkpositions. My logs started reflecting (to the day) a HUGE number of hits (around 15% of our average daily traffic) as coming from that admin.redzee address, all starting from the first time we got a sales call from them. If anyone know what addresses they use, I'd love to start stripping them from my logs, because it is rather annoying.

To say the least, their business is sleazy, and ideas unoriginal.

[rnrnasc]

Hi, I am new to this site and found it when I started researching Redzee when I signed up for their PPC program in November. Sounded like a great idea and my web traffic went thru the roof immediately, but I have been VERY suspicious since I noticed a discrepancy between my own web stats (traffic facts) and their internal ones. I called it to their attention and have been waiting for a valid answer from them for 2 months... I have been extremely busy, so I hadn't done alot of looking at my stats until today, when I logged onto traffic facts and they have a new format showing "most active visitor" on the front page. In the past week, one IP addy has come to my site and accounts for 276 hits and only 46 page views. I am a Realtor, and when bonafide people come to my site, they usually at least click to search the MLS from my home page, also if I had that many hits, you would think I would have gotten at least one call in the last 2 months, but I haven't. Does this sound strange to anyone? (I hope people are still checking this forum!) Here is the IP address visiting most: 24.52.163.167 does this match what anyone else is seeing?

[randfish]

RN - Interesting results, surely. It doesn't bode well for them and I've been getting complaints about the system from other folks, too (via my blog entry on the subject).

That IP maps to http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryi...NET-24-52-0-0-1 - Adelphia in PA. You could try calling them and letting them know that IP keeps hitting you through your paid search system...

[sanity]

Welcome to Cre8asite rnrnasc

Does this sound strange to anyone?

It most definitely does. The site I am referrring to in this thread is also a real estate site and to have hundreds of visitors just hit the homepage was a surefire giveaway.

Are you seeing any benefits from the PPC campaign? Are you able to track conversions at all? Personally I'd look at investing my money elsewhere.

Welcome to you too iamhrh

As for stripping RedZee out of your analysis program I guess it depends which program you use but I just filtered out all traffic from admin.redzee.com. Worked a treat.

This post has been edited by sanity: Jan 30 2006, 07:36 PM

[surfgun]

Hi I was a sucker that bought into this scam. I got the 10,000 hit promise. When my stat tracker started giving me reports on tracking when someone enters into my website, I found that everyone coming from Redzee.com only hits on my main webpage, that's it. Everyone else normally looks at 3-4 pages. It is like that have a computer program to hit on your website entry page to make the hit counter spin.

I called the local FBI office to report computer fraud, but I have the feeling they aren't doing anything about it. They are too busy trying to track down terrorists.

Now I have this stupid plugin on my Windows Explorer that is causing my browser to go crazy. It is like windowspositions is hijacking my homepage and Explorer is trying not to let it, so It goes nutty. Luckily I use Mozilla Firefox too.

Does anyone know how to get rid of the plugin that is screwing things up?

Thanks,

Steve Thompson

[stonecali]

Redzee is a total scam. Like the previous posters, when tracking the stats on my site, all the referrals from admin.redzee.com were one hit and they were outta there. It doesn't make sense because they were hitting a page that did not even show the products I sell. Hits originating from google adwords followed more logical paths through the products and NONE of those were just one hit - they were all AT LEAST 3 or 4 hits, usually more like 10 - 15.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Redzee hits stayed for less than 2 seconds and never browsed another page. We never received ANY orders from redzee hits. They are just spamming their own customers to get their hit count up so that they have to renew their plan (which they sell in groups of x amount of hits). It is a TOTAL FRAUD.

Hopefully nobody else falls for this scam. I was dumb enough to because when I signed up this thread was not here! Thanks to everyone who posts here and hopefully we can prevent others from falling into this trap.

[Candyman Ken]

Hi all,

I'm new here, found you guys looking for info on thers who had been scammed by redzee. I paid them $600 for traffic through positionsguru.com and got nothing for a long time then all of a sudden I received a bunch of traffic from them. After working through my raw log files, I find exactly the same thing as the prior post - all quick hits to the page I advertised. The "customer" never leaves that page. Hmmm.

Anyway, I love this forum so far and hope to help/learn more here!

Ken

[sanity]

Welcome Candyman Ken! What a great name.

Sorry to hear about your RedZee experience. The good news is you found us and next time can run things such as that by the community first. Positive out of a negative I always say.

[DeepRecon]

RedZee is nothing but bogus. If you have purchased key phrases in their "top 3" ppc program, every single hit that comes from either their search engine or their spybar is a bounce.

I'll say this again because it is very important:

Every single hit that comes from either their search engine or their spybar is a bounce.

Excluding my own testing, in every single case where an IP address has entered my sites from the redzee search engine - either directly from their search engine or from browsers that have the redzee spybar installed, which appends redzee "top 3" ppc results to the top of the Google, MSN or Yahoo organic listings - that IP address goes no further than the landing page. In some cases, the IP bounces out before the entire landing page is requested from the server.

I have tested and confirmed this through exhaustive manual analysis of my raw log files. There is absolutely no doubt that the redzee "top 3" is a scam.

I have severed my relationship with redzee in total disgust.

[sanity]

Welcome to Cre8asite DeepRecon.

Every single hit that comes from either their search engine or their spybar is a bounce.

Yup, that's what we figured last year. It's a shame more people don't find threads like this till after the fact.