Ubertor: Anatomy of a Lie

In the comments following this video, there is a long and angry posting by “wwtddn”, a supposedly disgruntled customer of MyRealPage. The poster chose to be relatively anonymous (“I am a Vancouver Realtor specializing in Duplexes. I am consider myself an avid user of the internet and used to be a novice webmaster”: according to his profile). I will not quote the whole posting, as it’s available online in the Blog link above. “wwtddn” claims that MyRealPage destroyed his website’s search rank and “tanked” his leads. “wwtddn” continues to incriminate our sales person in Vancouver by claiming that he made big promisses and then avoided calls when “wwtddn” needed answers. Then, he posts this, which I will quote in its entirety, as it’s important to this expose:

I initially posted my response in good faith that this person’s concerns were real (even though I had doubts). Then, afterwards, I was reading the following posting by Ubertor (also referred to in my other blog):

As I was scanning it, towards the bottom something caught my eye: a blurry graphic of a screenshot of one of our clients’ website which was used in that post. I couldn’t quite read the name but it looked very much like “John McGregor”. I followed the link to his website mentioned at the bottom of that page in the “Disclaimer”. Sure enough, that was him. Hm, I thought, this rings a bell, I think I have seen it somewhere! Sure enough, it was in “wwtddn” posting on Ian Watt’s blog; it was wwtddn’s “colleague”! So, a person that claimed to be a disgruntled customer of MyRealPage and oblivious of Ubertor (even as he is an avid user of the internet and a novice webmaster) ended up using the very same website in his criticism as did Ubertor in theirs over a year ago… Need I go any further?!

This was a bit of a shake-up for me. I have composed my previous blog on MyRealPage vs Ubertor: Facts and Fiction in good faith inviting an open exchange. I never actually realized how dirty of a game Ubertor plays online. It appears as though they are treating online searches as their little playground, by employing legitimate-looking posts, in order to sway a reader, looking for an objective opinion, into thinking that there is a large and vibrant community support for their company and an equally bad faith towards MyRealPage. Anonymous virulent bad-mouthing of the competition and outright lies (and even libel against real people, like our sales person in Vancouver)? How many of the praises and adulations posted for Ubertor are by real realtors “from the wild”, as opposed to customer friends. There is nothing wrong showing your support for friends, but to someone looking for a balanced story and objective opinion I would say: beware! you can’t trust anything you see regarding Ubertor in online discussions.

What also saddens me is that this company actively promotes itself in SEO business. Like many techies, I have always held deep respect for Google and other search engines for organizing the information on the internet by relevance, so people find what they are looking for; so it doesn’t degenerate into a spam-overrun mayhem,  as it happened prior to Google. And so, to see an SEO company employing these sorts of tactics makes me ask: How ethical are they in their SEO work for their clients, if they resort to these tactics in promoting them-very-selves! I hope Google’s spam group catches up to this.

In a way, there is a positive element in this for MyRealPage: we must be really making Ubertor worried! Our sales numbers show that. Maybe we are doing something right, even if an online researcher can’t discover that easily because of all the “noise”. Well, we’ll continue to compete by improving our products and giving our clients more value.

UPDATE: I further found this link:

Read the comment posted by “Tyler Deluert”. Doesn’t it sound like wwtddn? Needless to say, he is not MyRealPage customer. Shameful!