ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you probably know I put out a lot more content that is based on market data, facts, trends and a lot less on the industry gossip or chatty side of things.
I recently came across a story in the real estate industry and couldn't resist giving a little bit of coverage and support to a real estate blogger who has had the tables turned on him by a real estate marketing "intermediary".
A fellow real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy, who was recently asked to provide blog content for a company called ePerks did just that. Unfortunately, he spoke the truth about the ePerks business model and a raging online debate started with many of the commenters coming down on the side of "disagreeing" with ePerks' business model.
As a result, ePerks started a smear campaign against Vlad including posting blog entries all over the web about him being a criminal and filing a law suit against him!
The purpose of my post here is to stand up for the "little guy" and promote the opportunity for people to speak the truth online without such horrible repurcussions.
If you have any interest in this drama, you can read more from the link below:
http://www.go-beyond-mls.com/eperks-pulls-the-trigger-i-am-being-sued/
Let's all hope this type of trend does not continue.
Mitch
Date: Sunday, June, 15th 2008 @ 09:19:02 AMViews: 234
This blog entry currently has 1 comments posted.
Mitchell
I agree the suit is about negative blog comments.
However if ePerks tries to say their website and traffic was greatly diminished by the blog I would beg to differ because the robots.txt entry is doing more damage to their website than any negative post on a blog would.
Makes you wonder if ePerks did the robots.txt file on purpose or if its out of incompetence on the webmasters behalf.
If VLAD wants to end this just send the attorneys this link. - Look at the areas I boxed in Red.
http://www.interiorliving.com/eperks.jpg
For those who need an explanation.
http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/prevent.html
How do I prevent robots scanning my site?
The quick way to prevent robots visiting your site is put these two lines into the /robots.txt file on your server
I would estimate they did this around October/November and didnt change it.
ejerks should fire their webmaster and stop the stupid lawsuit. The robots.txt is doing much more damage to their site than any blog posting saying something negative.