eKaiser Insurance Sucks.com

One way that Google and other search engines judge the quality of a website and calculate its position in the search results is based on the number of sites linking back to it (called backlinks).

We receive Google Blog Alerts for the phrase ‘kaiser permanente,’ and this morning we began receiving alerts for numerous keyword-stuffed articles with slightly rearranged content, that are obviously intended to generate backlinks for search engine manipulation purposes. All of them are on ‘article submission sites,’ which are known to exist for the sole purpose of generating backlinks, and all were authored by someone with the comical name of Groshan Fabiola, which in all likelihood is not a real person. Each of the articles links back to ekaiserinsurance.com, and in the link text are the phrases Kaiser health care, Kaiser health insurance, and Kaiser health plan. By linking back to its website with that particular text, eKaiser Insurance is attempting to rank its site in the top of the Google search results for those terms.

From one of these article sites, articlesbase(dot)com:

“Submitting articles has become one of the most popular means of generating quality backlinks and targeted traffic to your website.”

A link on the same page takes you to their content spooler, which states:

“Incredible Software Creates Hundreds Of Article Variations Ready For Submission… 100% Guaranteed To Escape The Duplicate Content Filter!”

While we don’t want to link to any of the articles directly, which would create more ‘Google juice’ for these spammers, we are including screenshots of a couple of the bogus postings below. Note how they both say basically the same thing in a different way, with certain phrases that Kaiser and ekaiserinsurance.com would like to to dominate in the search results being repeated as often as possible. Click on the images to see a larger version.

The first is titled ‘Using Kaiser Permanente Online’:

And this one is called ‘Many Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance Options’:

Kaiser has always engaged in dirty search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, called Blackhat SEO. In November and December of 2005, Kaiser’s SEO people spammed kaiserthrive.org’s link to thousands of blogs, using a blog spambot through open proxies to avoid identification, in an attempt to get Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed banned from Google. They weren’t successful, but it is Kaiser’s willingness to engage in such unethical tactics that should concern people who are considering Kaiser Permanente for their health plan.

A few questions you might ask yourself before you purchase a health plan through eKaiser Insurance:

Is this the kind of organization I want providing my health care?

If they are willing to resort to unethical marketing practices, why should I believe they will be ethical in their delivery of health care?

There is certainly plenty of evidence available to suggest that they are not.

STOP THE MURDER BY PRBS

Posted at kaiserthrive.org:

Kaiser Permanente’s Prominent Role in American Health Care Deform

The impending release of Michael Moore’s scathing indictment of the US Health Care industry, ‘SiCKO’ — which features one Kaiser Permanente scandal after another — has the Kaiser PR goons working overtime. With their usual intent to baffle, befuddle and bamboozle, they would like to convince you to disbelieve what you see and hear with your own eyes and ears.

According to Raw Story:

The film’s most interesting scene is an archived White House conversation between then-President Richard Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman that Moore argues is the starting point of the modern healthcare complex. In the Feb. 7, 1971 recording — part of the hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret White House tapes — Ehrlichman explains “health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser’s Permanente thing.” Kaiser Permanente is now the nation’s largest HMO.

“Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. … All the incentives are toward less medical care,” Ehrlichman says to Nixon, according to a transcript. “The less care they give them, the more money they make.”

But…but…but… Ehrlichman got it all wrong, Kaiser says in its official response:

John Ehrlichman, in a 1971 conversation with President Richard Nixon that’s used in the film, crudely and inaccurately paraphrases a conversation he had with Edgar Kaiser. Ehrlichman’s distorted paraphrase badly misrepresents Kaiser Permanente, its goals, its strategy, and its not-for-profit model. A Kaiser Permanente “Health Care Memorandum to John Ehrlichman,” stored in the National Archives, clearly supports this, as does this National Archives White House briefing document.

Using a secondhand, inarticulate paraphrase to represent KP’s role in the health care reform thinking of an era is a sad distortion of the truth.

Welcome to Kaiser PRBS Tactico Numero Uno: Scapegoating the Messenger. The message itself is indefensible, so Kaiser blames everything on "crude and inarticulate" Ehrlichman, and pretends to be every bit as shocked and disgusted by his conversation with Nixon as the rest of us. The links to the National Archives are also a nice touch, because as everyone knows, when corrupt politicians and businessmen are hatching their evil plots to defraud the American public, they are meticulous about including evidence of their illegal actions in the official Memoranda. [@@<---rolls eyes]

The less care they give them the more money they make.

Hmm. Not too much to misunderstand about that, and of course we know that contrary to the PRBS, Kaiser does indeed withhold necessary medical care to increase its profits ($698 million in the first quarter of 2007 alone).

Conversely, money appears to be no object when it comes to really important things, like Kaiser’s advertising budget, or the enormous legal fees it routinely shells out to defend its despicable actions.

Read the rest