Dear FTP,
First off, let me thank you for your comments and feedback. All to often customers remain silent when they have questions or concerns about products being offered through our service. In addition to my responses, I have forwarded off your questions to Attracta, a 3rd party Search Engine Optimization company to validate and compare my answers with theirs. If there is any variance, I will make sure to update this post with those answers.
1) Who am I being directed to? Is it a 3rd party commercial SEO company?In relation to our SEO capabilities within cPanel, Canadian Web Hosting has recently partnered with an long-time Search Visibility Technology company known as Attracta. This decision was based on several factors including our desire to give our customers another tool and capability to get their websites recognized by the leading search engines. Attracta, as a leading technology company that has been delivering XML Sitemap services since the late 90's and today serves more than 65,000 customers each day. In addition to adding more SEO services, we also liked the usability, or ease in which customers could sign-up right their cPanel. Here is the recent post I put up that overviews their service and how the engagements works -
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1751.
2) Will the links change my website? I clicked one and it changed my robots.txt file without asking permission to do so (not happy about that). What links do EXACTLY what?The links should in no way change your website, and Attracta's primary function is to crawl your site looking for links or pages to make sure they are listed with the major search engines. During this process, the crawler will also identify any broken links, or areas for improvement, and list them off for you to review and change. You cannot actually make edits with Attracta, and in no way should they be able to make any changes whether requested or not. In relation to the robots.txt file, in order for Attracta to be fully utilized you do have to install a robots.txt file. Since the process is entirely automated, their does need to be some code that will direct the bot where and how to look. I do have some concerns about the file not asking your permission, and would like to follow-up with you further on this comment.
3) Can you improve Cpanel to have more information about this company and what will be done to a website's files? Asking explicit permission before altering any files or submitting information to search engines absolutely has to happen (after clicking the one link I discovered that the company has submitted my information to various search engines, and they did a crappy job with the sitemapping...again very unhappy about this).First off, let me apologize if the service was in anyway not to your satisfaction. I would be the first person to say that unfortunately not every service works to perfection each and every time. This is the reason that we have built in safeguards for our customers and to offer a layer of protection in the event that something doesn't work the way it is supposed to. For example, every service we offer is backed by a 60-day money back guarantee, and we would gladly refund any changes for your service. Secondly, with Attracta each customer is provided with a "Starter" account that essentially lets customers test drive the service before they actually buy it. I have reached out to Attracta about their permission parameters and have stressed the importance of asking and validating with our customers before any action is taken. I will post the reply to that comment as soon as I have it. With that being said, there are some changes on the horizon with the plug-in that will hopefully address some of your questions. The plug-in will be available by the end of June and offers:
• Improved user experience and interface iwth additional information about the company and the service.
• Resolution of potential installation errors of new accounts.
• Handles all detections of subdomains and redirects.
• Added SEO Consultation icon. Includes: Provides and sets a meeting to discuss SEO results and answer questions with our SEO advisory staff.
Hopefully I have addressed some of your questions, and if you would like any additional clarification you can reach out to myself or our support team directly at 888.821.7888. I will update this post as information comes in from Attracta. Again, we appreciate your comments and value your business.
Best regards,
Matt