I am not the only person who has been ripped off by the company that claims to be called Namecritic Inc. This may well be there name now, but at the time by troubles came about I had to make payments to Chris McElroy directly - not the company name.
Chris claims to be a great guy who runs a charity in his spare time. He has admitted in a blog comment that he uses this charity to pay his writers. The blogger believes this is a techique he uses to avoid tax and steal donations. There is no proof his money has been used for anything constructive.
You can read more about his charity scam:
(4 links redacted)
He tells his customers to search for his name in Google in order to find out about how well known he is on the internet. If you do this you will see results coming up from sites that say he is a scammer. No sites that come up for his results indicate that third parties recommend his services or even link to articles that he and his writers are commissioned to do. This is very suprising considering he has been blogging for years and, according to his site, he has been doing business online for 12 years.
As you can see from the URLs above, Chris has made more than a few enemies. Many businesses have been ripped off by Chris and his business partner Chuck Crawford. Chris and Chuck always recommend clients to each other. If you have been recommend to work with Chris through Chuck, or vice versa then take a step back and read the blogs listed above first.
What was my experience with Chris?
My company publishes articles on a wide variety of topics across many domains. For example, we own a site on car rentals. When someone wants to find out information about renting a car they visit our site. We then sell targetted advertising to companies. We're a publisher, and felt that the services Chris offers could be helpful. We were wrong.
We paid him to help us promote our sites and also bought articles from him to put on our sites. The content was obviously completed by someone who does not speak English as their native langauge. For a writing company this is concerning. I would have assumed their writers would have been better at writing than me. This was not the case! After complaining, Chris told me he could not make changes to those articles but in future they would be done by an American writer. I was really releaved as I had signed up for a 12 month contract.
The writing did improve, but was still very poor. Put it this way, Chris employs writers who target search engine traffic. They do not know how to write for visitors.
Anyway, the real nature of my complaint is how Chris got our site banned from Google. He decided to interlink our site with all the other sites that belong to him and his clients. I have since learned that this is a black-hat SEO tactic. And what was worse, after he got us banned we were still in a contract so he told us we had to pay the rest of the money. We have refused.
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