MagicYellow com – Deceptive and Misleading Sales Practice

After careful consideration, I’ve decided to blog about a sales call I received from David Greene at MagicYellow.com. It’s not that I’m angry or disappointed with MagicYellow.com’s services – I’m not a customer – but I feel compelled to speak out. The sales call I received was filled with misleading statements and outright lies, and I’m concerned that some business owners will be duped.

Let me say right now for the record that paying to have your business listed on MagicYellow.com has a value. What that value is I’m not terribly certain (I have some opinions below), but this is not meant to be a total and complete denigration of MagicYellow.com. I’m sure that many of their paying customers have received benefits in excess of their expenses.

***UPDATE August 2011: I have recently been contacted by management at MagicYellow.com regarding this blog post. Since the date my post was originally published (back in March, 2009) MagicYellow.com’s sales manager and the President of the company have informed me that:

• Many of MagicYellow’s practices have been changed/updated/reformed to improve the customer experience
• David Greene is no longer with the company.
• MagicYellow provides their clients with a directory listing that includes a followed link
• Contrary to what I was told by David, the ‘premier’ advertising listings ARE available for purchase
• MagicYellow employees pride themselves on honesty and integrity and respond to complaints seriously

MagicYellow.com has an open invitation to leave a comment below (comments are public), and I have even offered them a chance to send me a brief statement to be included here. As I have said, my goal is not to hurt MagicYellow.com in any way. This is simply my personal account of David’s 2009 sales call and my opinions on the services provided.

***

Still, my salesperson David tried very hard to deceive and mislead me, and my extensive sales experience told me he was following a script. After a quick search for the phrase “magicyellow.com,” it’s seems reasonable that these sales practices are systemic. Rip-off report mentions some rather generic and unqualified complaints, XOMReviews also has a rather generic complaint about poor customer service, but a blog post on Active Rain, a social network for real estate professionals, convinced me that my experience is not unique. I would encourage you to review my experience and these other experiences before purchasing any advertising from MagicYellow.com – see my notes below…

Here are the notes from my call:

• To begin with, David asked me to login to GoToMeeting (an online sales presentation tool) so we could “review my listing.” When I asked him if this was going to be a sales presentation, he said “no.” That was the first lie he told me.

• David’s presentation started with showing me that MagicYellow was a very plain and basic site, emphasizing that simplicity is what consumers wanted (true). Then he proceeded to explain to me that MagicYellow is the “wholesaler” for large amounts of traffic and that the Google AdSense ads on the left side of the page were part of a “special partnership.” Never in my internet marketing career have I heard of a “special partnership” with Google AdSense, so I’m going to call that lie number two.

• David also made it seem as if MagicYellow was the biggest directory on the web. Hardly. Local.com has about 10 times as much traffic. Yelp and Citysearch combine for about 40 times as much traffic. Since David never actually said that MagicYellow.com was the biggest, I can’t call this a lie. However, looking back, I wished I had asked for more clarification.

• The presentation involved me watching David navigate in his own browser. He went to Google.com, typed “add your business” into the search box, and then pressed “search.” MagicYellow.com comes up first – before Google Local, before Yahoo Local. David then said “see, we’re number one. When you search for ‘add your business’ Google leads you to us.”

I have a big problem with this statement. David was implying that Google was somehow endorsing or recommending MagicYellow’s service. I imagine that this is an effective sales technique for David, but it’s incredibly deceptive. Google’s search results aren’t an endorsement – they’re simply a listing of web sites that Google believes relate well to the keywords being searched. If I search for “neck pain,” the first result is MayoClinic.com. This does not mean that Google endorses the Mayo Clinic to cure my neck pain – it’s simply the most relevant result.

We’re sitting at three lies now, and the conversation has only been going on for 5 minutes. It never occurred to me that David’s misleading statements were intentional up to this point, but this next item convinced me otherwise.

• David started talking about good backlinks from MagicYellow, and I wanted to see some examples. When I asked him if the links from these pages were “follow” or “nofollow”, his response was “sure, people follow them.” For those of you who don’t know, “nofollow” links have very little link value. “Follow” links can have great link value, and the difference is significant when you’re trying to help your web site rank on the search engines. I explained to David that I wasn’t interested in paying for “nofollow” links (why would I pay for a low value/no value link?) and he pretended not to understand what I was asking. When he finally did acknowledge that MagicYellow.com backlinks were “nofollow” (and therefore not terribly valuable), he then spent 10 minutes attempting to convince me that nofollow links would boost my rankings. Perhaps. However, the statement “on the SEO side of things, this is phenomenal” is a stretch. Let’s call this lie number four.

At this point, I’m interested in hearing what David is going to tell me next. It should be noted that he’s getting pretty pushy by now.

• I ask about pricing. David tells me that I can have Spork Marketing listed in the search results for Denver Internet Marketing Services for “only” $450 per year. Wow. $37.50 a month for a nofollow link from a directory that gets 1/20th of the traffic of Yelp.com (where directory listings are free). What a deal.

• For giggles, I ask about listing Spork Marketing on MagicYellow.com nationwide. At first I’m told that it would be $450 for each of the 190 markets ($85,500), but then I’m offered a three month national subscription for $2,325. So we go from $37.50 per month for listing in Denver to $4.08 per month per market provided I list in every market in the country. How can that price difference be explained rationally? I’m then offered an extra category – that’s 2 listings in all 190 markets for 3 months for $2,325. That works out to $2.04 a month per listing per market (that’s actually not a bad deal). Still, the incredible pricing discrepancy is suspect. Did I mention that Yelp.com is free?

• The last item, in my mind at least, is the best. As David is explaining to me how much money I’m going to make from paying MagicYellow.com for a preferred listing nationwide, I took a screen shot of the Internet Marketing Services listings for Denver:

This is an actual screen shot of the “Denver Internet Marketing Services” category of MagicYellow.com.

Do you see the listing for Spork Marketing LLC under “Preferred Advertisers?” This is the placement I was being offered. Not only would my listing have to compete with the Adsense ads to the left (which are much bigger and offer more explanation), but I’m also competing with all of the “Premier” advertiser listings above mine. When I asked David about those, he explained to me that he couldn’t sell me a “Premier” advertiser listing. Upon closer examination, I noticed that one of the “premier” advertisers for “Denver Internet Marketing Services” is Chuck E Cheese’s.

Does Chuck E. Cheese offer internet marketing services? If so, this is the first I’ve heard of it

When I asked David “Why would I want to pay for Spork Marketing to be listed with Chuck E Cheese?” I think I stumped him. At this point, I was done listening.

The bottom line: Paying for a listing on MagicYellow.com probably makes sense for some businesses. The fact is that they still get about 1.5 million visitors per month, and some of those visitors are clicking on nofollow links and calling phone numbers. Still, the misleading and deceptive sales call, the suspicious pricing, and the pushy nature of the process convinced me that advertising on MagicYellow.com made no sense for my business. They offer free listings with your company name, phone number, and address, and I hesitate to recommend that as well (if only because you must endure a sales call).