I’ve had the displeasure of meeting “Mikey,” the founder of FabulousSavings.com, at numerous affiliate marketing conferences over the years. I only use the word displeasure because the guy comes across as extremely arrogant and has always treated Pepperjam Affiliate Managers with disrespect.

I believe that treating others with disrespect is unacceptable when it’s without merrit.

Personality conflicts aside, I’ve always wondered why FabulousSavings.com has practically dominated the organic search results over the last 12 – 18 months, especially for merchant trademarks.

Linkshare honored FabulousSavings with the coveted Innovative Affiliate Of The Year Award in 2006. Linkshare gave the company another award in 2007 for Fabu.com.

Honestly, I give Mikey a lot of credit for being as aggressive as he is and for building a very large affiliate marketing company.

I don’t claim to know Mikey and I certainly wish him and his business well. My negative opinion of him is my own and has nothing to do with the real point of this blog post, which I’ll dive into right now….

I just completed reading a blog post written by Rand Fiskin, an industry friend and very well-known search engine marketing expert about Michael Yack “Mikey” and FabulousSavings.com. Rand documents the fact that FabulousSavings is employing a number of unethical link farming techniques and other search-engine optimization strategies that are clearly in conflict with every major search-engine’s terms of service.

For those of you who don’t know him, Rand speaks at conferences around the world and has addressed elite academic communities, including Stanford University. Rand’s clients include NPR and Geosign, among many other notables. Rand’s blog – SEOMOZ – is arguably the authority when it comes to search-engine optimization. I highly recommend SEOMOZ as a daily read.

Rand’s blog post about Mikey and FabulousSavings.com can be found HERE.

I’ll let Rand’s post speak for itself – “Michael Yack, Link Farmer, Makes it Big with FabulousSavings.com in the Toronto Star.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 1:46 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, search-engine marketing, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.