Time to Expose an Underhanded Solar Company
On June 08, 2008 in Solar News
Well folks, this is a first.
I’ve never had to publicly call someone out on this site for using underhanded business practices, except for Becky from SiliconSolar, for what I will call a “borderline spam” comment.
Today is the day I want you to actually pay attention to what I’m writing here.
“Arizona Solar Installers” (http://www.getsolar.com) did something that made me a little mad.
If you check out the comments on my post regarding a “Solar Space Heater” you will see the comments left by Varun from Arizona Solar Installers.
First they left this nice hunk of spam(bold indicates a link to their website):
- Varun Said,Arizona Solar Installers - Arizona Solar Installers - Find Solar Energy Professionals and Solar Installers in Arizona at Getsolar.com.
Then they must have figured out that my comment form requires some form of spamming knowledge, and put this comment in less than a minute later from the same IP address:
- Arizona Solar Installers Said,Arizona Solar Installers - Find Solar Energy Professionals and Solar Installers in Arizona at Getsolar.com.
Must be they realized they wanted the business name associated with this hunk of spam so google will give them some love when my site gets crawled. This is pretty dirty, folks.
Ordinarily I would just remove these comments (like I do with all spam) so they don’t get a return link from my site, because that is what they want.
In this case though, since I am being spammed by a company selling solar stuff, I decided I would let my distaste be known.
Also though I want you to know that even by calling these spammers out I am unfortunately helping their cause a little bit, because google will see links from my site, and think that “Arizona Solar Installers” are actually useful, therefore bumping up the page rank.
The IP address the spam was posted from turns out to be from Delhi, India. Now what’s all this business about “Arizona Solar Installers” then?
IP address: 117.197.145.9 Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns1.apnic.net.] Reverse DNS authenticity: [Unknown] ASN: 0 ASN Name: IANA-RSVD-0 IP range connectivity: 0 Registrar (per ASN): Unknown Country (per IP registrar): IN [India] Country Currency: INR [India Rupees] Country IP Range: 117.192.0.0 to 117.255.255.255 Country fraud profile: Normal City (per outside source): Delhi, Delhi Country (per outside source): IN [India] Private (internal) IP? No IP address registrar: whois.arin.net Known Proxy? No
The worst part is that this guy that owns this website supposedly has business experience. Seems to me he should have thought about what the public would think of his company after he hired spammers in India to ruin his reputation. Here is what I found on freshtilledsoil.com
“Client of the Month - January, 2008
Matt Jennison, GetSolar.com
We’ve started 2008 with some of the nicest clients a design company could ever wish for. No, this is not some sycophantic effort to stoke their egos. Like any company that provides a service we have had our share of bad clients. The Client of the Month is our way of acknowledging that in the sometimes difficult process of building and marketing a website there are some people who make it a lot easier to get the job done. Matt Jennision is one of those people. Matt honed his marketing and customer service skills in the commercial airline business, most recently as a captain on the Boeing 737, for Southwest Airlines.
In addition to his flying/managing duties, Matt was a senior contract negotiator for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, negotiating the 1997 and 2002 agreements. After looking at his own carbon footprint from 14,000 hours of flying, he decided to apply his management and marketing skills to the renewable energy sector, in an effort to change energy generation and consumption patterns in this country. Matt holds a BA in Political Science from Skidmore, and an MBA in Technology Innovation from MIT.”
Here is their add on linksreferences.com: "solar installers Get Solar.com | PowerHouse: A New Kind of American Home. Finding a trusted professional in a field as new as renewable energy can be a time-consuming and daunting challenge. GetSolar.com takes all of the guesswork out of the equation and helps you easily access a list of qualified pros in your neighborhood.” They might have quality pros in your neighborhood, but they are also paying spammers in India to bother me. I can understand that getting a website off the ground and getting traffic to it can be difficult, especially with no public referring links. I even toed the line that Mr. Jennison is toeing when putting up this site. HOWEVER: There are some fundamental differences between what I did and what Mr. Jennison did (whether personally or on his behalf.) In order to get search engine traffic, you need backlinks. I got a few personal legitimate backlinks through human contact (like Mr. Jennison should have attempted with me, it would have gone well, I promise.) Then I put some comments on blogs and posts on message boards, with links to my site. The differences though, are clear to me. I was not putting an advertisement for goods or services on someone else’s website. I was responding to questions/statements with useful information, and then providing my website as a free avenue to explore such technologies and ideas. I do not sell anything. I do not provide any services. I do not make any profit from this website. Google ads have brought in a little but THIS IS NOT A BUSINESS. Matthew Jennison, however, has crossed the line in my opinion. I would have certainly given a link to his site had he sent an email or left a comment with some useful information. Instead, there was a spam comment much to the tune of a billboard left in the comments section of one of my posts. Not only that, but it is one of my posts with some keywords that I’m sure Mr. Jennison would love to have Google associate with his site. I cannot influence the world, but I am certainly willing to give the facts and my own opinions on what Matthew Jennison, Arizona Solar Installers, getsolar.com, and their crazy Indian spammers are doing. Today I left a comment on one of Mr. Jennison’s blog posts. He probably won’t approve it, so his readers will never get to see how he is trying to step on people providing free information in order to sell them a service. That’s right folks, this kind gentleman thought he could leave some spam here, and rather than have you read some of the nice good free information I link to, he wants you to go give him some money to do what you can do on your own. This is called solarDIY for a reason. Mostly the DIY part but I also post some stuff about solar once in a whileI suppose you can say this whole experience has really given me a newfound distaste for people trying to take advantage of the alternative energy community as a whole, and I will not stand idly by and watch it happen anymore. From now on, any time I see a solar company doing something shady, I’ll be sure to let the public know. <update> Here is pretty much the resume of my new friend Matt Jennison Here is a comment someone named George from getsolar.com left on the wired blog which is lacking in substance, but certainly not directly spam like what they left here. Oh and they couldn’t forget a link to their site
And the same junk again on another news site: 5/7/2008 6:18:49 PM “Just fyi if you’re lookng for local solar panel installers, this is great resource: http://www.getsolar.com” Apparently old-school advertising doesn’t work anymore? Here is a comment on a cnet news article: by georgebizpro May 7, 2008 5:20 PM PDT FYI, for anyone interested in looking into getting solar power for their homes, this is an excellent resource to find local solar panel installers in your area: http://www.getsolar.com” Looking at the google results, I could probably find examples like this all day long. Some are less nefarious than others, but most are down right spam. George sure is a Biz Pro, isn’t he?
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