Gee whiz – the assisted living space is getting pretty crowded – and crowded with some pretty shady characters.
Seems like every time I look at my blog comments, there’s another spammy, awful “referral” service or site trying to post their site and information, in hopes to benefit from our site’s reputation and longevity (we’ve been around for almost 6 years now).
I also get google alerts for “assisted living” and almost daily a new site posts a PRweb-type “press release” about their new and “revolutionary” assisted living finder or service that offers the most complete, unique and unbiased service out there…..or something to that effect. When I actually go to the site out of curiosity (knowing what I’ll get when I click on it) – it’s the same old-same old – a very spammily put together site with a big, obvious lead form so they can capture your information to sell to the highest bidder.
When I say “crowded” that may be a bit of an overstatement – since, most of these lame sites will fall to the wayside soon enough. I mean, if you have to resort to stuffing your site’s url into other sites’ blog comment section, you probably aren’t getting quality sites to link to you naturally and organically – which means that you probably don’t have quality content or worthwhile services.
To the end-user – my advice is when you are truly looking for assisted living for yourself, or a loved one – take a little time to research a website that you are looking at. Find out how long they have been around, and make sure you know exactly what they are going to do with your information once you hit the ‘submit’ button.
It’s becoming a bit of a dark neighborhood out there – be careful!
