No libel here. Today I successfully defended in court a claim from Rocketfish Ltd (rocketfishltd.co.uk) for a contract I entered into with them in July 2010. They failed to deliver what they promised, the sought in excess of £4,000 from me. The court dismissed their claim and ordered them to repay c. £500 of the £1000 I had paid to them. It was great to succeed against these people who promise the earth and deliver little. Their appeal against this was dismissed by the judge.
This is now in the public domain, and if in doubt refer to Banbury County Court, Claim No IBC00901.
It was only at just gone 4pm yesterday that the decision was made by the judge. I guess details of these CCJs must appear on line somewhere, but it probably takes a while to filter through the system.
I am just so pleased because these sort of companies that call themselves SEO specialists really need some form of regulation, IMO.
Edited to add: After searching on line it seems that if if they pay within one month then they will be removed from the register. I can’t find out if free access to the the register is possible - but sites like http://www.trustonline.org.uk will give you the information for a fee of £4. The judgement is not on there yet, I might add.
I am a representative of Rocketfish and want to clarify this situation. We entered into a 12 month contract with this gentleman in good faith and after 4 months he stopped paying. We tried to deal with him properly and get him to pay what was due on his contract without any success. We continued to work on his project for a period of time even though he had stopped paying but this clearly couldn’t continue indefinitely. After a long period of trying to get our money through other channels we eventually took this chap to court. He counter claimed to get back everything he had paid. Without going into great detail as our solicitors will now be dealing with this chap. When he signed up with us part of our agreement was that we did a certain link building activity which subsequent to his sign up wasn’t going to be as effective due to Google’s algorithm changes. In the best interest of the client (where Google is concerned) we changed this activity for different link building that was going to be more effective.
The judge ruled that we couldn’t receive the balance of our contract because we effectively stopped working on his account when he stopped paying and awarded him one payment from the 4 he had paid because we clearly had carried out most of the work we should have at this point but not the link building activity. So therefore because we were trying to do the right thing for the client and reacting to an ever changing landscape where google is concerned we have had to give one payment back! Not the judges fault SEO is a complex subject and some of them just don’t understand. We do not want to get into conflict with clients we accept you can’t please everyone all the time but our dedicated team try really hard to do this for every customer. Trying to drive our company out of business as he puts it when we have a group of really hard working dedicated individuals trying to the best job they can for clients and this chap is trying to put their livelihoods at risk is outrageous and I feel he should take a long hard look at himself and his own business and ask if one of his customers stopped paying their contract would they really get the best service afterwards?
This is clearly trying to damage our company and the way he has portrayed this is far from the truth and so we have no alternative than to pass it onto our solicitors who will pursue him through the proper channels - we will also be passing this onto the Judge involved who I am sure will have their own view on this.
With regards to the follow on post - no ccj awarded against our company - why would there be?
There is nothing to gain from responding to John Bonney’s attempt at defending the indefensible point by point. Suffice to say that in the Small Claims Division of the Banbury County Court on November 29th 2011 it was determined that Rocketfish Ltd’s claim against me had failed and that my counterclaim was upheld, although for a lesser sum than I sought. That is a CCJ.
The truth is that they were contracted to set up up to 15 micro sites and register the domain names at their expense to me. They did not build a single site or register a single domain name. The judge, who fully understood the arguments (although not in John Bonney’s opinion, as she didn’t tell him what he wished to hear) clearly stated that they had failed to fulfill the terms of the contract. She also criticised the evidence they submitted as incomplete and in part, simply recently downloaded from my website and not necessarily created by Rocketfish at all.
If anyone wishes to test just how good Rocketfish’s link building is, try this in Google (which is the major search engine in the UK by a country mile - c. 90% of all searches), copy and paste this into the Google search box. Just two links, both created by my efforts. And that’s it.
I would love to hear from John Bonney’s solicitors. I stand by what I have said, because it is true, and is now a matter of public record. I have made this issue public, because I really feel that there are too many so-called SEO company’s out there who do very little and seek to charge a lot for the privilege.
Just to add: I’m not going to get into a slanging match either. When the Her Majesty’s Court Service have processed the judgement and it appears on line, I will post the link to it however, FYI.
Finally, just to get the figures absolutely correct, Rocketfish claimed that I owed them £2925.80. It was Rocketfish Ltd that instituted proceedings, although I had offered John Bonney the option of simply calling it a day by an email to his personal address on January 7th, 2011. He did not even have the decency to reply. The judge dismissed their claim in full. Actually if they had been proved right it should have been £3209.94 but I can’t answer for their mathematics. My counterclaim was for the return of 3 of the 4 monthly payments I had made (I acknowledged that they had done a modicum of work such as tinkering with some metatags). That amounted to £1187.93. The judge reduced that to the return of 1 month’s payment of £387.00 plus VAT plus Court Cost, which totals £490.98. Rocketfish were ordered to pay within 14 days. The judge denied Rocketfish the right to appeal.
Not sure what happened with this guy he seems pretty bitter but we have worked with these guys for years and they are outstanding great results and great service?
I would like to express my opinion on other threads listing ‘Rocketfish Ltd’.
We have been using ‘Rocketfish Ltd’ for 12 months now and have seen a significant increase in visitor traffic and Quality Leads as a result of the Search Engine Optimisation work carried out on my website.
I would recommend there service’s to any small to medium sized business looking to expand their online presence.