A few weeks ago, we took a look at a couple of logo design review sites, posing the question “are they legit?”. One of the sites we took a brief look at was some outfit called companylogos.ws – a ‘review’ site that while listing The Logo Factory as one of the top five logo companies, gives our humble shop a two out of five ratings (a suitably humble review I guess). Apparently we’re pretty good in the logo design department, but lose in the economy department – charging “thousands of dollars on every logo design” (no idea where anyone got that idea from – as nice as it would be, our logo design pricing is pretty well on par).
We also come up at the bottom of the ‘top five logo company’ pile because of lousy customer support (you have no idea how many times I’ve had to tell our admin Tasha – in charge of customer support – not to worry about what she took as a personal dig). Some of you may be wondering why this site got under my craw. Here’s why…
A while back, I noticed that we were starting to slip in the Google Image Search rankings for various keyword phrases. All fair enough in the logo design search engine game, I guess, and part of the natural ebb and flow of the internet. In this instance, a lot of the images beating ours were from a website called companylogos.ws. But here’s the blinder. Those images were designs created by The Logo Factory and pinched right off our site. If you searched for, oh I dunno, aviation logos in a Google image search, you’d find a design that we created. Trouble is, it’s being hosted on someone else’s site. Namely companylogos.ws. And not just a few. We’re talking dozens. And then some.
Companylogos.ws isn’t a design company website per se, but a ‘logo design company review’ site, that other than placing us in the top five logo companies, didn’t have anything terribly nice to say about the shop. The site claims that it is ’strongly committed to delivering unbiased, independent reviews and tips regarding logo design and professional logo companies’. Okay, fine, but if would have been nice if they asked before lifting our portfolio images en mass. Usually, if designers are into such things, they’ll request critiques and reviews of their logos on forums and design blogs. And just because some of our logos are on a website does not give anyone the right to take them off wholesale, and place them somewhere else, review site or not. It’s not cool, in some cases it’s copyright infringement (fair use won’t cover what we’re about to find out), it screws up our agreements with our clients (we have permission to publish our client logos but only through certain avenues) and at the very least, it’s lacking in some very basic professional courtesy. And that’s if the site is legit.
If it wasn’t legit, it would mean that someone was taking designs off our site, putting them on another (blowing any agreements that we had with the original client all to hell), the sole purpose of which was to drive traffic to a competitor. While slamming our company to boot. I’ve been in this business for, I dunno, a hundred years, and have seen some pretty shady biznet. If this site wasn’t legit, the shadiness of this one would be off the charts.
Amazingly, the shenanigans are wrapped up in a site that, while supposedly offering ‘unbiased’ and ‘independent’ reviews, seems remarkably biased towards a company called Logo Design Guru who currently sit at #3 for a Google ‘logo design’ keyword search. While the review site gives Logo Design Guru a remarkable 5 out of five stars (and can’t say enough good things about the company) there’s no apparent connection between the companylogos.ws domain and LDG, the contact form on companylogos.ws is broken and the WHOIS record of the site doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s no way to get a hold of these guys and they’re making some fairly extensive efforts to keep it that way. Alas, I’d have to do a little bit of internet detective work to find out exactly who thought it proper to take (without so much as a howdya do) dozens of images off our site and then use these very same images against our site in search engine rankings.
As I mentioned in my original logo review post, another ‘logo company’ website, CORPORATElogos.ws, is a Logo Design Guru ‘love child’ website. It also sits on the same web host as COMPANYlogos.ws, the supposedly fair and unbiased review site. The WHOIS record of companylogos.ws is a bit funky. But while there’s no obvious LDG ownership (other than the review and affiliate links we already mentioned), the corporatelogos.ws and companylogos.ws domain names are so similar in name and concept (and use a funky web extension .ws which is the country-code top domain for Western Somoa) that I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t registered as part of a batch. That’s how people generally end up with families of web addresses – registrars now automatically suggest related domains when you’re filling out online submission forms. I could be wrong, so let’s take a look.
Woops, both were registered on October 17, 2003. Now, I wonder what are the chances of two people registering these two domains, without knowledge of the other, on the very same day? Not a gambler myself, but the odds have got to be fairly long. The odds of those two ‘independent’ domains showing up on the same web host five years later would have to pretty extreme. And then to imagine that one of these domains gets turned into a Logo Design Guru website with a vehicle wrap, and the other gets spiffied up as a logo design review site that happens to think Logo Design Guru is the greatest company in dah world would be kinda remarkable. And when you realize that companylogos.ws features a ‘buy your logo from Logo Design Guru‘ affiliate link at the bottom of every page, well the odds fly off the probability tables.
Looks like the folks at companylogos.ws are busy on SEO content generation, but have forgone even the affiliate link for this linkorama, inexplicably linking directly to the Logo Design Guru site when you click on any of the buttons that say ‘View Portfolio“. Strangely, the links don’t feature the usual affiliate code, and the Logo Design Guru pages that they link to don’t seem to be available in any search engine. Makes me wonder a) how they knew where the pages are and b) why a site that’s sole reason for being is to make a percentage of logo sales, forgot to include their affiliate link. Without that little money-making HTML code, would seem like a waste of time (especially for a site that’s otherwise not terribly altruistic). Normally, one could assume that pages like this were designed for the sole purpose of SEO love and link-building, but as the site has nothing to do with Logo Design Guru, I’m sure this is just another one of those weird coincidences.
And while we’re talking about coincidences – some of the inbound link SEO for companylogos.ws takes place through a free stats image script embedded in other peoples websites. The owners of those sites get a funky little counter thingamajig, and the script contains a link (for purposes of SEO and Google link love) making it all worth while for the people giving them away. The stats counter promoting link love to companylogos.ws is hosted by some statistics company called Right Stats.
In keeping with our ‘things that make you go hmmmm” theme, on the Right Stats home page, there’s a link for ‘company logo design services’ that links back to Logo Design Guru. There’s also a solitary ad banner linking to some website called Logo Snap. Oddly enough, some cat called Ram Jee is spending a lot of time regurgitating re-edited logo articles over at Ezinearticles, the sole purpose of which seems to be driving inbound-link juice to companylogos.ws AND Logo Snap.
What is Ezinearticles? Well, that’s an ‘article publication’ site with a laudable goal that’s been taken over by content-writing monkeys, all interested in getting their keyword-rich links aimed towards this site or that. Only goes to follow, one supposes, that anyone who spends whatever time it takes to scrape, cobble and edit an article together (just to get a link) has some vested interest in that site. Either as an owner, or as paid content creator. It’s pretty safe to if anyone goes to the trouble of ‘writing’ an article, thats sole reason for being is to feature links to BOTH logosnap.com and companylogos.ws would indicate there’s some connection between the two sites. But who would do such a thing? Well, lessee. There’s Jessica, there’s Stacey, there’s Jennifer, there’s Nicole, there’s Bradley and let’s not forget about Takemi. There’s more but I think you get the picture – lots of people spending lots of time sending link love to the companylogos.ws and Logo Snap websites. Although it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, Logo Snap rates highly on companylogos.ws who give the site this ‘unbiased’ review – “arguably the best company offering pre-made corporate logos online“.
So who, or what, is Logo Snap? Why, it’s a do-it-yourself flash-driven logo generator website that just happens to belong to Logo Design Guru. So, other than providing SEO to companylogos.ws and advertising LDG’s Logo Snap, who are Right Stats? Good question. They just happen to be one of the three companies listed as “our websites” on the profile page of Pakistan-based Right Solution. The other two are Logo Design Guru and Webby Guru. And the oddly named Webby Guru just happens to be LDG’s web design ‘division’.
And with all of that, I think we might have answered the question as to who thought it fitting to pinch half our portfolio, place it on another site with some keyword soaked ‘reviews’ in order to place their site well in Google. While being less than kind to their competition with supposedly ‘unbiased reviews’ that are obviously not ‘unbiased’. Oddly enough, it’s the same cast of characters behind logoblog.org – yet another ‘unbiased’ review site, and the subject of our previous look at people claiming to feature ‘independent’ logo company reviews. Of course, they also seem to like Logo Design Guru too. A lot.
Curiouser and curiouser.
But as odd as it all this ‘logo review’ nonsense seems, I’m sure the Logo Design Guru folks, and their Pakistan-based ‘partner’ company are wonderful and above such antics. As any professional would know, trying to pass off ‘unbiased’ reviews that are decidedly, well, biased, would be a trifle shady and one would think, below such a self-described ‘credible’ company. And the very idea that a ‘credible’ company would be somehow connected to pinching a mess of logos from a competitor’s site in order to create content for a ‘love child’ website is simply too zany to contemplate. So we won’t.
And oh, yeah. Our Trinity Engineering logo being reviewed on the companylogo.ws aviation and marine section, in respect to its effectiveness as and aviation or marine logo? All cool and all, but the design has nothing to do with aviation. Or matters marine. It’s an engineering logo.
In the interest of accurate ‘logo reviews’ and all that.
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Well done Steve…. You always cut it right!