Hackersafe – Telemarketers Who Don’t Understand “No”

If you run a website online that has a secure side, no doubt you've gotten calls from a company called Hackersafe. For a small fee, they let you put a little button on your site that shows your site to be secure and safe from hackers. For free, you could easily make one of your own and put it up there, so I'm not sure the benefit of this thing - since no one (outside of webmasters) have ever heard of Hackersafe.

Hackersafe touts their service in an appealing manner. It'll help with conversions. It'll help with traffic. You'll get a link out of it (oh, that magic word!). Let's start backwards on these claims.

The link you receive comes from Hackersafe's directory, which already has thousands of outbound links, so your link will never be seen by anyone, ever clicked on, etc. It's pointless. Also, your website will be forced to link to Hackersafe on 100% of the pages on the site, so you are giving up thousands of links from your site (potentially) for one in return. Yeah; that's fair.

The second claim is that it'll help traffic. I presume this is from the marvelous link you get back. Since no search engine cares if you have a Hackersafe logo, they won't rank you higher. Your PPC ads will not be raised a spot or two because of a Hackersafe logo. Any website you advertise on will not give you more exposure because of a Hackersafe logo. What's the basis behind this claim?

The final claim is that the presence of the logo will help with conversions. I ran with Hackersafe a few years ago. The increase in conversions (if there was any) is negligible and easily explained away by random chance or seasonal differences.

But the real problem with Hackersafe is their repeated and annoying telemarketing calls. I get calls from them every week asking me to sign up with them. Every time they call, I remind them that we used their service a few years ago and it was a waste of time. They seemed stunned that I'm a former customer. Nice record keeping, guys. Then, when asked to "put me on your do not call list" - and they agree. I get another call the next week from them and we go through the same routine.

I got my latest call on Cyber-Monday. In the morning, no less. After a holiday shopping weekend. I told the guy who called exactly this, "You all have the nerve to call on cyber monday, supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year, in the morning, after a long weekend, to telemarket me? After I've repeatedly told you to stop calling me?"

His response was that, "He has a job to do too."

And I hung up. That's nice of them, isn't it? Pretending to try and help out webowners with their service then telemarket them on a monday morning? The nerve.

Hackersafe should be ashamed of themselves.