Last night I received an email from Karl Parkinson, the owner of Computeach, wanting to put up a post on my site about his company. He wanted to address comments on this site that exist for Computeach here, and here. I replied, saying it probably wouldn’t help them much as any obviously positive post would stand out as suspect.

I did ask if he had any other suggestions, but he never replied. Then today I received an email from Greg Hartigan, head of HR and Legal at Computeach. He sent me this email.

Dear Sir/Madam
Can I draw your attention to your statements on the following link: http://www.mrdaz.com/computeach-reviews/(entitled “Computeach Reviews?”, Posted on September 28th, 2008).

Your statements imply that Computeach is wrongly trying to pass off the positive reviews contained in www.computeach-reviews.co.uk as independent. In fact the opposite is true: the website is entitled “Welcome to the official Computeach Reviews website” and also states “We have a selection of Computeach reviews from students about their experiences with Computeach…All these reviews are from genuine students and clients”. It also includes Computeach’s logo and branding. So in our opinion any reasonable person would form the impression that the website in question was in fact owned by Computeach. Our website is therefore very clear about the source and purpose of the reviews.

Indeed the 2 responses to your posting (i.e. SirBigWig dated Sep 29, 2008 at 9:44am and JamesW dated Sep 30, 2008 at 7:50pm) make it very clear that the impression created by your posting is that Computeach has acted disingenuously (albeit unsuccessfully).

We think that your statements are unfair to our company. Therefore we respectfully request that you remove these statements from your website with immediate effect and we would appreciate confirmation that you have done so.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Yours faithfully
Greg

So Computeach are trying to say that they weren’t attempting to pass off their site as a reviews website? Why would any company setup a reviews website for their own company? It just doesn’t make any sense. The URL (computeach-reviews.co.uk) was obviously an attempt to rank for ‘computeach reviews‘ in Google, which is what anyone considering taking one of their courses would search for. When you do search for that in Google, you find 8 out of the 10 results on the first page feature hordes of negative comments, and the other two results are computeach.co.uk.

Doesn’t bode well for them does it? It looks very much like Computeach were trying to rank on that page for a search on ‘Computeach Reviews’, but as their computeach-reviews.co.uk website didn’t rank, they paid for it to rank using PPC.

So, what do you think, should I remove the posts or should I leave them as they are and allow people to have their own say on what they think?

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Darren Jamieson

Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.

    

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