One of the problems we see across various services we provide is that there are lots of companies offering services that they seem to have a limited, at best, understanding of what they are providing. One of things that can disguise that is that we often find that other companies have copied descriptions of our services, including in some cases claims about our capabilities. That obviously makes it hard to determine who you should go with when you see multiple companies making similar claims without knowing that the others not only don’t have the capabilities claimed, but that they are making claims that are just copied from elsewhere.
In some cases in the past we have seen companies that knew so little about what they were offering that they had changed the properly spelled names of software to incorrect spellings (probably because they ran the text through a spell checker that wasn’t aware of those).
Recently while looking into something we ran across an example of somebody copying the description on one of our services. Here is how the description for our Zen Cart Upgrade Service began as of August 23, 2011 on archive.org:
Keeping your installation of Zen Cart up to date is important because it insures your website is not hacked through a known vulnerability in Zen Cart. If your Zen Cart installation has already been hacked we can clean it up and then upgrade it. In addition to making sure your website is secure, new minor releases fix bugs and new major release add new features and functionality.
The version as of June 11 of that year was slightly different.
Here is how the description of the same type of service by a company named Zucando (https://zucando.com/zen-cart-modules/services/zen-cart-upgrade) begins today:
Keeping your installation of Zen Cart up to date is important because it insures your website is not hacked through a known vulnerability in Zen Cart. If your Zen Cart installation has already been hacked we can clean it up and then upgrade it. In addition to making sure your website is secure, new minor releases fix bugs and new major release add new features and functionality.
Those are exactly the same except for the lack of a link to a hack clean up service. Nowhere on their website do they seem to offer such a cleanup service.
According to release notes tab of their service, it was created well after we had started using that description text:
- Date Added: 18 Dec 2013
The earliest version of their page that archive.org has, is from March 4, 2014 and the text is exactly the same as it is today.
Google isn’t really help to people since their page shows up higher than ours in relevant search results despite the text being based on ours.