Lynne McTaggart has published a post [http://www.lynnemctaggart.com/blog/272-the-campaign-against-what-doctors-dont-tell-you-continues]
suggesting that skeptics (we're in 'quotes' for some reason) have managed to convince
Tesco that customers have been complaining about the magazine What Doctors Don't Tell You
. I don't think this is quite right - any complaints I've sent to Tesco
either by email or Twitter haven't focused on my customer status, only
why I think the medical information in the magazine isn't up to scratch.
Ms McTaggart also suggests that we've "harrassed dozens of [WDDTY's] advertisers by reporting them to the ASA" - well I'd say the advertisers have made misleading advertising claims and the expected response to that would be
to report it to the ASA. From what I can tell the ASA agreed that the
ads were misleading and adjudicated against quite a few of them for
breaching the advertising guidelines that all marketer are meant to
follow.
Then things get a bit odder - she says that various
skeptic organisations "sent their foot soldiers to hide our magazines on
the shelves of stores and attempted to destroy our Google ranking."
True
enough several people hid magazines, but framing this as 'foot
soldiers' is a bit daft. A couple of people tweeted about doing it on
the #wddty hashtag, it amused some others and they did it too. Not really a
command from on high.
Regarding the Google ranking - this
seems to relate to a persistent misunderstanding of how 'Do Not Link'
works. When a website links to another website it is effectively
implying to Google's webcrawlers that it values that website. By using
tools like Do Not Link we're telling Google to ignore this implication -
but we're not worsening the Google ranking, we're just not increasing
it.
The sentence "One of our websites was even mysteriously hacked into" seems to suggest that "skeptics did it" but websites are hacked all the time and I suspect it's more likely a coincidence. Of course it is possible that there are rogue skeptics doing this but I doubt it.
"Simon
Singh is busy these days tweeting his supporters to write Tesco to
thank them for not stocking us." - yep, I followed this suggestion as it
seemed a good one. I was quick enough to write to them when they were
selling it, no bad idea to thank them for (eventually) listening to my
concerns.
Saturday, 28 June 2014
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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.
Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).