Back in March of '08, on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to sign a 12 month contract with a company called 121Limted.
This is what they sell:
A keyword, or keywords, that (once purchased), upon being searched, will land you on the front page of the sponsored results of any search engine (that you pay for) every time that keyword is typed in. Once you purchase a keyword, no one else can purchase that keyword from them.
For Example, say you purchase "professional photographer", and say your keyword costs you $50 a month to land on the first page of sponsored results for google. Say you decide to pay another $50 a month for yahoo as well. So now you are paying a total of $100 a month for the word "professional photographer". 121Limited promises that every time someone types in "professional photographer" in either Yahoo or Google, your ad will land on the 1st page of the sponsored results.
How is it that they can do this you ask? I asked the same thing. Their claim was that they have a "special" relationship with the search engines because they send them volume.
See google's SEO info for what google says about companies that make such claims.
I bought my keyword for a $100 a month! I thought WOW, this is too good to be true. To land on the first page of a sponsored search result with google analytics CPC would cost me more like $1500 a month. I tried to do some research on this company before I foolishly went forward but to my surprise nothing on the internet popped up. Since the person who referred me was using them and was happy with them, I figured that no reviews were better than bad reviews.
The first couple of weeks, I had to check and make sure my keyword was working.indeed it was! Unmistakably, 24-7, whenever I typed in the keyword into the google search engine, my ad would be right there on the 1st page. Pretty soon my incessant need to check the keyword daily dropped off, and I forgot all about it as 121 limited. automatically deducted $100 every month from my account. Eight months later, business being slow, I thought I'd check to see how the ol' keyword was doing. To my surprise, my ad was no where to be seen.
Needless to say, I was furious. I kept checking to no avail. So I decided to take screen-shots of my results daily, at least twice a day. A month later, after compiling enough evidence, I contacted my lawyer. The conundrum was that there was no way for me to know how long my ads had not been showing. We wrote a letter to 121 limited stating this breach of contract and saying we'd like out of the contract and that we would like a full refund or we would pursue the matter in court. 121 gave me a call and denied any wrong doing. Despite the evidence I had that my ad was not showing up on the 1st page, 121 claimed that they have done nothing wrong and that their software shows that my ad is showing up and getting hits. The issue of the 1st page was conveniently sidestepped. They continued to charge me for the following month and later they wrote a letter to my lawyer saying they have let me out of the contract but that if I pursue this matter in court, they will send the balance I owe them to collections! At the time of writing this, I haven't had a chance to consult with my lawyer, but isn't that kind of retaliation illegal? Only a dishonest company like 121 Limited, would bother making threats rather than try to resolve the situation and keep their reputation.
My theory is that 121 limited operates simply by bidding on words with google CPC as you and I would. Only by scamming volumes of people, they are able to place really high bids on keywords at the beginning, insuring they land you on the 1st page, but later drop their bids and place high bids on other client words. My guess is that the only reason why some words show up more frequently (like my friend's) is because they are words that don't get high bids from other CPC advertisers.
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