Deliberate misrepresentation of who they are and what they do. web.com?
9/2017 I got a call from web.com representatives linking me to a presentation screen saying web.com and pushing their services as a billion dollar web company to help with online advertising. I asked them how they would address specific challenges and their response was 'if we told you that then you wouldn't need to hire us. We are a billion dollar know it all online marketing company. So we know..' Frankly they lied to me outright to pass my online reputation check. So after getting my credit card number and charging it, an email came thanking me for joining Yodel. Yodel was never mentioned during the presentation. Of course! Because their reputation is horrible!
Replied back cancelling and they won't cancel. Today I noticed that they put a google ad directly over mine to divert business away from my ad. When one caller came through their ad they sent a congratulations email and i replied back with cancel. Looking online i googled my keywords and found a fake website with my companies name on it and a fake diversion phone number. These people are just plain criminals. BTW the google ad is exactly the same as what we have already. So the misrepresentation that they could do better was an outright lie also. However the main problem is that I checked out web.com while talking to them and of course this lie about who they are covered their tracks.
I am no longer a customer of Yodle Inc. Their sales pitch is, they will move your company's name up to the first page in a search engine on the web. So if you search for a particular company/service, they guarantee your name will be 1st or 2nd on the page results. They ask you to upload your contacts and then proceed to track any phone calls that come in through the web and tell you look what we have done for you. In the short time we used them (3 mos), we had 166 calls. Of those 166 calls, 5 were from people we had not had contact with previously the rest were current clients. Of the 6 web inquiries, 4 were emails direct from Yodle and 2 were employment requests.
In their sales pitch to our company, we were told there was a three month "contract" for a specified amount of money. After the three months we would be on "month to month" with no contract. We could cancel at any time. We were also told the monthly charge would not be anywhere near the astronomical charge we paid for the first 3 months. The charge would be based on the level of service we chose. They bill one month in advance.
When the three months were up we were never notified by the company asking what level of service we would like to proceed with. Never received a contract from them. Proceeded to charge us the astronomical amount that we paid for the first three months. When I called to complain they said they could cancel our subscription but could not reimburse us since it was already billed. This was three days into the new billing cycle. 27 days had not been used.
Had my credit card company get on the phone with me to discuss the reimbursement of this charge with a manager from Yodle. The person on the phone from Yodle talked himself right into a corner as he kept changing his story the more the credit card company representative asked for specific and concrete answers. As of this posting, the reimbursement issue has not been resolved.
If you are looking for a company to help you increase your web presence, stay away from Yodle. There are other companyies out there that are reputable and do not lie, steal and cheat. Do your research. We should have known something was wrong when we asked for referrals and was told it wouldn't be eithical thing to do as they were in our "market" area. Yodle lied to us from the very beginning. Starting with the pricing, the contract, the month to month and the amount of "new" calls we would receive.
If I ran my business and treated my clients the way they do, I would be out of business but, I guess when you charge such an astronomical fee for the three months and then continue with that amount even when you are not suppose to, you can make money to stay in business no matter how many people cancel your service.
This company is the very worse for any on-line services. I used them several years ago, and found them lacking in there ability to generate Service Leads as promised.
I desided to give them another try after one of their reps called and said they had changed how they do their marketing, and if I signed on for (6) months I would notice some great changes as to how they now opporate. She said that they require a payment of $1993.00 to activate my listing and that I would be getting calls from customers right away. Three months later... we got two, and one was for services we don't provide. So I thought I would give them another month since other SEO companies we use needed Two months to get us calls. After (3) months with no calls I called to cancel my service and asked for a refund of half the remaining balance, they said NO. I tried to cancel with my Credit Card company, but they said it was past the three month limit and would have to work something out with Yodle. We even did a three way call with me and the credit card company to Yodle and spoke with them about the refund. They said they would look into it and would only issue a partial refund if I wanted to stop service. Told them I wanted to stop service at that time. I've been waiting for a refund since September.
Will never use them again, and will tell everybody I come in contact with at their homes not to use this service.
I don't see how the people who work at this company can go home to their spouses and not self loathe enough to have no libido. If you're reading this, you're probably someone who is already pissed off by these people, or a few e-signatures away from becoming pissed off by these people. I work as a marketing coordination for a small business that is a franchise of a larger corporation, and we were looking to revamp our web marketing. Yodle were one of a couple choices that stood out to my boss. I never understood why, but despite showing him all the stuff on BBB, here, and even entire articles dedicated to this scam, he still decided that they were the best choice.
This is probably because in their first call, they start their lying. They say they are "the experts" in your field! Whether its shoveling dog poop or selling weapons, I'm sure these guys always assert themselves as the experts.
Not only are they experts in your field, they're experts at the internet! Just kidding though, the only thing they're experts at is lying and not feeling like a sack of garbage for it -- if you're at Yodle and are reading this, have you ever considered running for local office?
Of course, they're not experts at anything. I have a very limited knowledge of HTML- learned how to build an ugly website when I was 12 - and these guys did not know a single thing. Time after time I had to tell my so called "web expert" how to color text, make links, and insert images. Not to mention how to spell -- if you claim to be "web content experts",you should know how to spell words and arrange them in a way that doesn't sound like Hindi put through google translate. Not only that, but they claim to work with companies like Yext and be Google Partners and all this other really fancy stuff that can lure someone who is not too knowing about web presence techniques into their six month long and very expensive trap. This very special position of being a google partner is a bit misleading. They're a "Premier SMB Partner", which if you google it, seems like a whole lot of marketing. You should be aware there's well over 700 (that's all I bothered to count because it seemed endless) SMB partners just in web / internet marketing alone. Not only that, but after getting a marketing call from Yext, we learned they actually did not work with Yext at all.
I'm honestly one of the most patient people that I've ever met, and these guys drove me up a complete wall almost every day. There's always some mistake. My coworker has been working on correcting over a hundred improperly done listings almost all week now, and getting the smallest change done to your web content or code is IMPOSSIBLE! Especially the code, since they use Webs templates and are literally not allowed to touch it. Did anyone else use freewebs a decade ago? They use those. You can pick a very similar website up for $10 a month through the source. You can seriously only pick from 4 predetermined color schemes for your page and from like 6 different templates, so actually Freewebs wins this round.
I'm a currently enrolled college student and hope to become an SEO marketer one day, and let me say that from what I have learned at my university, these guys will end up throwing your ranking into a bottomless (but flaming) pit if you let them do what they want. They encourage you to spoof your locations, give you spoof phone numbers that makes google ignore you, duplicate your content, and will only ever make you appear for the most irrelevant search terms. Spoiler alert, nobody is googling "66048 waste removal" for your garbage company in Kickapoo. Our four yodle websites generated 1 lead. Not each, total. We have had then for six months and now that we want to cancel, our rep just isn't returning our calls. It's too late for us, we've already blown a couple thousand, but if you're a small business owner just save yourself while you can!
Don't believe me? When they show you an example site during your sales presentation, write down the number on the page. Call someone random from your own industry with Yodle and see how that one is working for them. I'm willing to bet they won't be raving, or better yet, the number will be disconnected because they packed their s**t and left.
No results in 8 months of services supposedly getting me leads for my real estate business. I paid over $2,000. and got 3 phone leads, 2 were "unknown".
They spent more time trying to keep my business than getting me leads, and after repeatedly telling them to cancel my service (more than 5 times) I had to just hang up to get the "account saver" to shut up!
These people hacked my website added a phone number to it that they tied to my number. When I confronted them about this they denied doing any thing. I was very clear that we had no agreement to do any such thing and I did not want to do business with them . They were also told by my marketing manager that my company will not be doing business with them . Yodle has since tried to charge for their services to continue as if no one had told them that we aren't going to do business with them.
They keep taking my money. They won't let me leave. They won't even reply back to me. I have never felt so angry towards a company in my life. Please don't use Yodle. They will rip you off, they will lie to you, they will ignore you. I am still losing money to them. As a small business owner they are taking my money and leaving me with nothing. I can't even get a reply except ppl telling me they are forwarding my information along. Weeks now with nothing. Please run away from Yodle. Don't believe their promises. They are the worst business decision I have ever made. Please run away from them.
I signed up with Yodle 2 weeks ago. They can't seem to get my website right. It looks infantile. The time I've spent correcting their mistakes I could have spent building my website.
1. The sales person said I could use my web address, which is untrue. They gave me a web address that did not state in any way what my services are. They finally got me a web address that makes sense but it's certainly not my company's name.
2. A manager seemed to understand bookkeeping services is not the same as tax preparation but their web writer/ developer told me I must have tax preparation listed as a service since that's my segment.
3. I get a call from someone that tells me they actually have a bookkeeping segment and they'll make changes accordingly.
4. I sent a document with the content I'd like to see on my website. They did a copy and paste to the web leaving their default text in it. Pages look repetitive and infantile. Fonts are different in every page.
5. I specifically was asked if I wanted my address to be public. I told them not, since I'm yet working from home. In every search I did my home address is fully disclosed on the internet.
6. When I use keywords to search for my services, I cannot see my website in the first 6 pages of search results.
7. When I search by company name I can see my company as a tax preparation service on the search results.
8. Customer Service is quick to apologize and be understanding but unprofessional when executing services.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND YODLE FOR MARKETING & WEBSITE SERVICES. Spend your money someplace else.
Sales rep outright lied about the amount of traffic coming from my area - claimed 400+ searches for, specifically, masonry work. Not possible since the area has a population of about 2000, low permit issues so far this year. Told the sales person the numbers can't be real, that her boss is lying to her. Decided to try the service anyway, with lower expectations, because I had been thinking of expanding my part-time workload. Got two calls for $100 repair jobs from 200 miles away. modified my area to nearby only and got spam phone calls only. $1200/6 months for these results.
Please do not give this company your hard earned money. Not only did they overcharge me, but Have never received one single solitary lead from which I could recoup the money I spent. Saying they over promise with their slick sales people and under deliver isn't doing that phrase justice.
Yodle represented themselves as being able to grow my website popularity and customer base to increase sales. What they did was created a separate website so that they could potentially control the relationship. I wanted to grow my existing website no their new proxy website. The also tried to represent my company as a Taxi which it is not I provide a " For Hire" Airport Shuttle Service. And I tried several times to explain to them that it was wrong and illegal to attempt to market my company as a taxi service and not what I wanted either way. They did this buy buying a domain name that they own and attempting to get me to load all of my information in to their pre-existing template. Why would I do this when I already had a website that I wanted to steer business to? They then tried to get me to upload all of my customer and email and social media information so that they could manage it.
They were doing this to get access to all of my data. I wanted them to grow my customer base not manage existing customers. Everything about them doesn't make sense. They intentionally mislead me into a situation where the would benefit regardless of how it worked for me and I would pay them to do this. My instincts said it was a scam to begin with when I had to pay them a cancellation fee with no trial period. Buyers beware!! Read the other reviews if you don't believe me.
The pushy salesman didn't promise we would get leads, but he sure said we would. So far we have had zero, zilch, nada....
We tried to cut our losses and hoped for a refund. Less than 10% and we hadn't even used 70% of the "budget"! They did not promise any refunds for their failures to generate any business for us. They wanted us to spend more money with them though!
They did say "look at how many clicks you've had". We realize this has done nothing for you, but look at all those clicks. Half of those clicks were probably from them anyway.
If you like wasting your time and money then go ahead and employ Yodle. Or just give it to a homeless man, you may feel better about it then.
Yodle, Inc. Reviews
Deliberate misrepresentation of who they are and what they do. web.com?
9/2017 I got a call from web.com representatives linking me to a presentation screen saying web.com and pushing their services as a billion dollar web company to help with online advertising. I asked them how they would address specific challenges and their response was 'if we told you that then you wouldn't need to hire us. We are a billion dollar know it all online marketing company. So we know..' Frankly they lied to me outright to pass my online reputation check. So after getting my credit card number and charging it, an email came thanking me for joining Yodel. Yodel was never mentioned during the presentation. Of course! Because their reputation is horrible!
Replied back cancelling and they won't cancel. Today I noticed that they put a google ad directly over mine to divert business away from my ad. When one caller came through their ad they sent a congratulations email and i replied back with cancel. Looking online i googled my keywords and found a fake website with my companies name on it and a fake diversion phone number. These people are just plain criminals. BTW the google ad is exactly the same as what we have already. So the misrepresentation that they could do better was an outright lie also. However the main problem is that I checked out web.com while talking to them and of course this lie about who they are covered their tracks.
This business will say anything and everything to drain your bank account.
Do not waste your money on these scoundres
I am no longer a customer of Yodle Inc. Their sales pitch is, they will move your company's name up to the first page in a search engine on the web. So if you search for a particular company/service, they guarantee your name will be 1st or 2nd on the page results. They ask you to upload your contacts and then proceed to track any phone calls that come in through the web and tell you look what we have done for you. In the short time we used them (3 mos), we had 166 calls. Of those 166 calls, 5 were from people we had not had contact with previously the rest were current clients. Of the 6 web inquiries, 4 were emails direct from Yodle and 2 were employment requests.
In their sales pitch to our company, we were told there was a three month "contract" for a specified amount of money. After the three months we would be on "month to month" with no contract. We could cancel at any time. We were also told the monthly charge would not be anywhere near the astronomical charge we paid for the first 3 months. The charge would be based on the level of service we chose. They bill one month in advance.
When the three months were up we were never notified by the company asking what level of service we would like to proceed with. Never received a contract from them. Proceeded to charge us the astronomical amount that we paid for the first three months. When I called to complain they said they could cancel our subscription but could not reimburse us since it was already billed. This was three days into the new billing cycle. 27 days had not been used.
Had my credit card company get on the phone with me to discuss the reimbursement of this charge with a manager from Yodle. The person on the phone from Yodle talked himself right into a corner as he kept changing his story the more the credit card company representative asked for specific and concrete answers. As of this posting, the reimbursement issue has not been resolved.
If you are looking for a company to help you increase your web presence, stay away from Yodle. There are other companyies out there that are reputable and do not lie, steal and cheat. Do your research. We should have known something was wrong when we asked for referrals and was told it wouldn't be eithical thing to do as they were in our "market" area. Yodle lied to us from the very beginning. Starting with the pricing, the contract, the month to month and the amount of "new" calls we would receive.
If I ran my business and treated my clients the way they do, I would be out of business but, I guess when you charge such an astronomical fee for the three months and then continue with that amount even when you are not suppose to, you can make money to stay in business no matter how many people cancel your service.
This company is the very worse for any on-line services. I used them several years ago, and found them lacking in there ability to generate Service Leads as promised.
I desided to give them another try after one of their reps called and said they had changed how they do their marketing, and if I signed on for (6) months I would notice some great changes as to how they now opporate. She said that they require a payment of $1993.00 to activate my listing and that I would be getting calls from customers right away. Three months later... we got two, and one was for services we don't provide. So I thought I would give them another month since other SEO companies we use needed Two months to get us calls. After (3) months with no calls I called to cancel my service and asked for a refund of half the remaining balance, they said NO. I tried to cancel with my Credit Card company, but they said it was past the three month limit and would have to work something out with Yodle. We even did a three way call with me and the credit card company to Yodle and spoke with them about the refund. They said they would look into it and would only issue a partial refund if I wanted to stop service. Told them I wanted to stop service at that time. I've been waiting for a refund since September.
Will never use them again, and will tell everybody I come in contact with at their homes not to use this service.
I don't see how the people who work at this company can go home to their spouses and not self loathe enough to have no libido. If you're reading this, you're probably someone who is already pissed off by these people, or a few e-signatures away from becoming pissed off by these people. I work as a marketing coordination for a small business that is a franchise of a larger corporation, and we were looking to revamp our web marketing. Yodle were one of a couple choices that stood out to my boss. I never understood why, but despite showing him all the stuff on BBB, here, and even entire articles dedicated to this scam, he still decided that they were the best choice.
This is probably because in their first call, they start their lying. They say they are "the experts" in your field! Whether its shoveling dog poop or selling weapons, I'm sure these guys always assert themselves as the experts.
Not only are they experts in your field, they're experts at the internet! Just kidding though, the only thing they're experts at is lying and not feeling like a sack of garbage for it -- if you're at Yodle and are reading this, have you ever considered running for local office?
Of course, they're not experts at anything. I have a very limited knowledge of HTML- learned how to build an ugly website when I was 12 - and these guys did not know a single thing. Time after time I had to tell my so called "web expert" how to color text, make links, and insert images. Not to mention how to spell -- if you claim to be "web content experts",you should know how to spell words and arrange them in a way that doesn't sound like Hindi put through google translate. Not only that, but they claim to work with companies like Yext and be Google Partners and all this other really fancy stuff that can lure someone who is not too knowing about web presence techniques into their six month long and very expensive trap. This very special position of being a google partner is a bit misleading. They're a "Premier SMB Partner", which if you google it, seems like a whole lot of marketing. You should be aware there's well over 700 (that's all I bothered to count because it seemed endless) SMB partners just in web / internet marketing alone. Not only that, but after getting a marketing call from Yext, we learned they actually did not work with Yext at all.
I'm honestly one of the most patient people that I've ever met, and these guys drove me up a complete wall almost every day. There's always some mistake. My coworker has been working on correcting over a hundred improperly done listings almost all week now, and getting the smallest change done to your web content or code is IMPOSSIBLE! Especially the code, since they use Webs templates and are literally not allowed to touch it. Did anyone else use freewebs a decade ago? They use those. You can pick a very similar website up for $10 a month through the source. You can seriously only pick from 4 predetermined color schemes for your page and from like 6 different templates, so actually Freewebs wins this round.
I'm a currently enrolled college student and hope to become an SEO marketer one day, and let me say that from what I have learned at my university, these guys will end up throwing your ranking into a bottomless (but flaming) pit if you let them do what they want. They encourage you to spoof your locations, give you spoof phone numbers that makes google ignore you, duplicate your content, and will only ever make you appear for the most irrelevant search terms. Spoiler alert, nobody is googling "66048 waste removal" for your garbage company in Kickapoo. Our four yodle websites generated 1 lead. Not each, total. We have had then for six months and now that we want to cancel, our rep just isn't returning our calls. It's too late for us, we've already blown a couple thousand, but if you're a small business owner just save yourself while you can!
Don't believe me? When they show you an example site during your sales presentation, write down the number on the page. Call someone random from your own industry with Yodle and see how that one is working for them. I'm willing to bet they won't be raving, or better yet, the number will be disconnected because they packed their s**t and left.
No results in 8 months of services supposedly getting me leads for my real estate business. I paid over $2,000. and got 3 phone leads, 2 were "unknown".
They spent more time trying to keep my business than getting me leads, and after repeatedly telling them to cancel my service (more than 5 times) I had to just hang up to get the "account saver" to shut up!
These people hacked my website added a phone number to it that they tied to my number. When I confronted them about this they denied doing any thing. I was very clear that we had no agreement to do any such thing and I did not want to do business with them . They were also told by my marketing manager that my company will not be doing business with them . Yodle has since tried to charge for their services to continue as if no one had told them that we aren't going to do business with them.
They keep taking my money. They won't let me leave. They won't even reply back to me. I have never felt so angry towards a company in my life. Please don't use Yodle. They will rip you off, they will lie to you, they will ignore you. I am still losing money to them. As a small business owner they are taking my money and leaving me with nothing. I can't even get a reply except ppl telling me they are forwarding my information along. Weeks now with nothing. Please run away from Yodle. Don't believe their promises. They are the worst business decision I have ever made. Please run away from them.
I signed up with Yodle 2 weeks ago. They can't seem to get my website right. It looks infantile. The time I've spent correcting their mistakes I could have spent building my website.
1. The sales person said I could use my web address, which is untrue. They gave me a web address that did not state in any way what my services are. They finally got me a web address that makes sense but it's certainly not my company's name.
2. A manager seemed to understand bookkeeping services is not the same as tax preparation but their web writer/ developer told me I must have tax preparation listed as a service since that's my segment.
3. I get a call from someone that tells me they actually have a bookkeeping segment and they'll make changes accordingly.
4. I sent a document with the content I'd like to see on my website. They did a copy and paste to the web leaving their default text in it. Pages look repetitive and infantile. Fonts are different in every page.
5. I specifically was asked if I wanted my address to be public. I told them not, since I'm yet working from home. In every search I did my home address is fully disclosed on the internet.
6. When I use keywords to search for my services, I cannot see my website in the first 6 pages of search results.
7. When I search by company name I can see my company as a tax preparation service on the search results.
8. Customer Service is quick to apologize and be understanding but unprofessional when executing services.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND YODLE FOR MARKETING & WEBSITE SERVICES. Spend your money someplace else.
Sales rep outright lied about the amount of traffic coming from my area - claimed 400+ searches for, specifically, masonry work. Not possible since the area has a population of about 2000, low permit issues so far this year. Told the sales person the numbers can't be real, that her boss is lying to her. Decided to try the service anyway, with lower expectations, because I had been thinking of expanding my part-time workload. Got two calls for $100 repair jobs from 200 miles away. modified my area to nearby only and got spam phone calls only. $1200/6 months for these results.
Please do not give this company your hard earned money. Not only did they overcharge me, but Have never received one single solitary lead from which I could recoup the money I spent. Saying they over promise with their slick sales people and under deliver isn't doing that phrase justice.
Yodle represented themselves as being able to grow my website popularity and customer base to increase sales. What they did was created a separate website so that they could potentially control the relationship. I wanted to grow my existing website no their new proxy website. The also tried to represent my company as a Taxi which it is not I provide a " For Hire" Airport Shuttle Service. And I tried several times to explain to them that it was wrong and illegal to attempt to market my company as a taxi service and not what I wanted either way. They did this buy buying a domain name that they own and attempting to get me to load all of my information in to their pre-existing template. Why would I do this when I already had a website that I wanted to steer business to? They then tried to get me to upload all of my customer and email and social media information so that they could manage it.
They were doing this to get access to all of my data. I wanted them to grow my customer base not manage existing customers. Everything about them doesn't make sense. They intentionally mislead me into a situation where the would benefit regardless of how it worked for me and I would pay them to do this. My instincts said it was a scam to begin with when I had to pay them a cancellation fee with no trial period. Buyers beware!! Read the other reviews if you don't believe me.
The pushy salesman didn't promise we would get leads, but he sure said we would. So far we have had zero, zilch, nada....
We tried to cut our losses and hoped for a refund. Less than 10% and we hadn't even used 70% of the "budget"! They did not promise any refunds for their failures to generate any business for us. They wanted us to spend more money with them though!
They did say "look at how many clicks you've had". We realize this has done nothing for you, but look at all those clicks. Half of those clicks were probably from them anyway.
If you like wasting your time and money then go ahead and employ Yodle. Or just give it to a homeless man, you may feel better about it then.