Litigation

So Fort Worth settlement planner Dirk Weeks of Structured Annuities, Inc. calls me about the "Woobie post". After saying how much he appreciates how much we are doing to help clean up the accuracy of information disseminated by the industry, he asked me to show him where the structured settlement watchdog observed the " Hartford woobie" in relation to his company. So I showed him:

Download Google search structured settlements v cds

Download Vs_certificate_of_deposit.pdf 10-18-2010

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

But it brings up an interesting point. Even though Weeks stated to the structured settlement watchdog that he had requested that his techies remove the page "and has the bill to prove it", as you can see it still appears on The Internet and is readily accessible by a direct Google link that appears in a Google search. 

Let that be a lesson to all.

Sometimes a  removed post or web page stays in a cache or storage area on Google (or other search engine) for a period of time after a website has been crawled. Other times a web page may be deactivated by removing a link from a home page, but it can still be accessed by other links to the page, whether internal or external (such as a direct link from Google in this case). It may also be accessed by someone who knows the URL.

With all sorts of online services like ZoomInfo and Intelliius grabbing whatever information they can off the "Net, it is important to make sure that if you remove a page that the page is really removed or erased.

Weeks correctly observed that advertising appears on the pages of Structured Settlements 4Real. This has been the case since early 2010, although the blog has been delivering content since 2005.  Nothing unusual. Many financial sites have advertising.

As an aside he alleged that now we "get paid to bad mouth people". Trust me, the advertising isn't a career move.  Like many other, we make available ad zones within the site to advertising services that serve up the ads.

As has been the case since at least 1762, when it was observed by Bishop Robert Lowth in A Short Introduction to English Grammar, two negatives equal a positive. Thus if the structured settlement watchdog "bad mouths" (i.e. "highlights") bad actions then that's good, right?

Come on folks, clean up your websites!

"If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we always got". -Henry Ford (1863-1947), American founder of the Ford Motor Company