Is Jill Whalen a Scam? Yes, She Is!
In my research for last week's post on click distribution across Google Sitelinks, I found something pretty funny. I was testing to see what names, when used as queries, generate sitelinks when the names themselves are not part of the domain.
About the only person in the SEO/M space who can claim that is Jill Whalen, because a query for [jill whalen] brings up a set of Sitelinks for her site, HighRankings.com. And that is very impressive.
But what concerns me is the paid ad that comes up for that query:
I don't want to give that site any real credence (so if you want to key it in, go ahead, but don't expect a link). I clicked over, expecting to at least find some valid accusations. Instead, it was more like a biography written by an eighth-grader (to be read, apparently, by sixth-graders).
But if we start to put the pieces together, I think we might find that Jill really IS a scammer. To wit:
- She offers a newsletter on Thursdays, yet I can recall several instances of issues coming out on Wednesdays, or worse yet, Fridays. LIES.
- On the High Rankings Forum, several topics are labeled as "pinned." Yet they're not really "pinned" at all, are they, Jill? Aren't they really suspended in place using some sort of code? HALF-TRUTHS.
- Jill co-founded SEMNE, or the Search Engine Marketing Network for New England. Yet sometimes it is called the Search Engine Marketing Organization for New England. So which is it? And shouldn't it be SEMNNE? Or SEMONE? Where did the other letters go, Jill? Where? DECEPTION.
I think I've made a pretty strong case. Proceed with caution.