WeightWorld’s woeful SEO work

WeightWorld might not be calling me names or threatening to sue but they certainly have a strange approach to search engine optimisation.

I’ve just found this in my Inbox:

Dear Webmaster, We have just found our link on your https://josephinejones.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/this-weeks-asa-adjudications-three-complaints-upheld-about-misleading-healthcare-claims/ with different anchor text which is pointing to our website WeightWorld.co.uk There are many of the links coming from your website to ours and we feel that it will harm our SERP and SEO efforts as well as your domains too. So I request you to remove that anchor text and link from your website as soon as possible and inform me back. Your kind help will be much appreciated. Many Thanks, Webmaster

If you are a quack who has been caught out for misleading advertising then writing to me and reminding me of this is not a good idea. Telling me I might be harming your SERP and SEO efforts will only encourage me to harm them even more.

Happy Birthday, Dr Burzynski… and goodbye, antineoplastons

In  honour of Dr Burzynski’s 70th birthday, a group calling itself Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP) has delivered a $13,000 donation to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital, asking Dr Burzynski to match the donation.

And in other news, the Burzynski Clinic appear to have stopped promoting antineoplastons altogether.

‘Dr’ Stephen Ferguson’s recordbreaking ASA adjudication

The Advertising Standards Authority have upheld my complaint against Dr Stephen Ferguson’s Natural Health Clinic website. He was found to be in breach of eight of the CAP Code rules – more than any other live blood analyst on my list.

Yet surprisingly, the ASA have not asked him to stop calling himself ‘Dr’. As Ferguson explains here, (at the bottom, just after the incredible CV):

The use of Dr before Dr Stephen Ferguson’s name is for PhD, the highest level of learning, not because he is a chemical drug doctor (GP). He is a naturopathic doctor the number 1 in the world, curing disease using only natural techniques and substances. NO CHEMICAL DRUGS (which are needed at times, but always damage the body and create other diseases, and in most case just mask the ones you already have pushing them deeper into your system, so you stay a legal drug addict for life in most chronic cases).

Live Blood Analysis and the ASA: a catalogue of complaints

Live Blood Analysis (also known as “nutritional microscopy”) is a quack diagnostic technique which was described as ‘fraudulent’ by Professor Edzard Ernst as long ago as 2005 and which has already been covered many times on this blog.

When I first heard about Live Blood Analysis, I was so shocked by what I found that I was moved to act. Happily, the ASA had just extended their online remit to include company websites.

The following list details the outcomes of all the ASA complaints I know of concerning live blood analysis and its practitioners.