While doing a quick Google search on the new name of my company - Serengeti Communications - I noticed that there’s now a listing in the top 5 from Merchant Circle, which talks about how you can:

Contact Serengeti Communications to request a deal, get a coupon or to do business.

Strange, I wasn’t aware that we were offering ‘deals’, or handing out coupons…

I’m also not keen on their little box at the top right of the page that indicates that you can ‘talk to’ Serengeti Communications through their site.  For a user that’s used to interactive sites, such as Carmax, this may lead them to believe that typing in this box will link them directly to a Serengeti Communications sales person.  Instead, it appears to post a comment to the Serengeti forum on their site, and from reading Matt McGee’s review of Merchant Circle from last year, Merchant Circle then contacts the business to let them know that there’s a message out there on the forum.

The information about the company has obviously been scraped from our website, so when I saw the blog section, I assumed that they’d also scraped our blog - EndlessPlain.com… nope, there’s apparently a Merchant Circle blog for Serengeti Communications… which had better remain blank, as we’re not writing it.

I’ve got to say, IYP sites and directories that list information about a company are absolutely fine by me, but when one purports to have a relationship with a company that it doesn’t have, either implicitly or explicitly, then that to me is a big red flag.