Step 8. Go to Allwhois website (www.allwhois.com) and look up dishonest party's domain name. This might give you some information about dishonest party and who is providing them with web hosting. Inform company providing them with web hosting that if they continue to provide dishonest party with web service, their company may be charged as an accomplice in a criminal action.

Step 9. Sometimes a company has their own servers and do not use a web hosting service. Go to Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) website. (www.icann.org/general/contact.htm) ICANN is organization that has responsibility for Internet address space allocation. Contact them to find out how to get dishonest party off web.

Step 10. If dishonest party is still operating and you learn who their other customers or advertisers are, contact those customers or advertisers and notify them of your problem. Inform them that they have now been notified and if they continue to associate with and support dishonest party, they may be charged as an accomplice in a criminal action.

Step 11. Use a search engine to find any message boards and discussion forums that might be interested in your problem. You might find that many other individuals have been ripped off by same company and you may be able to initiate a class action lawsuit.

As you can see, some of these steps are pretty nasty. How many of these steps you actually take depends upon how mad you are and how much time you want to dedicate to extracting revenge. In your attempts to punish dishonest party, it is very important to stick with facts. Don't exaggerate or make false accusations. If you exaggerate, they could turn around and file a lawsuit against you for false advertising against them, or for character defamation.

Keep all your actions focused on solving actual problem. If you begin contacting dishonest party or other parties related to them with information or accusations not related to actual problem, you could be charged with harassment. However, you cannot be charged with harassment for frequently contacting a party in an effort to get a product or service that you paid for and didn't receive, or to get paid for a product or service that you have provided.

Disclaimer: Stephen Bucaro assumes no responsibility for damages resulting from use of this information. This information is provided with understanding that Stephen Bucaro is not engaged in rendering legal service. If legal advice is required, services of a competent Lawyer should be sought.

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On to next step;

Since you have google toolbar, just right click on mouse, and scroll down to "backward links", and click on it. This is another neat feature of Google Toolbar. It tells you how many other sites, or pages that link to page or site in question. Very powerful tool. The site in question... ZERO! Imagine that :)

Even tho this is usually enough to deter me, there is one more simple test, that really takes cake. Just do a search at Google for term "SEO" and "search engine optimisation". Is this site listed in top 10? The top 20? top 100?

In our case, yep you guessed it... A BIG FAT NO!

Ok, so here is a site, selling SEO work, and offereng link packages to thousands of other sites, for hundreds of dollars, claiming to give YOU top search engine rankings when..

1. They have no links to their own site 2. They themselves, don't even have top search engine listings!

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of successful SEO companies out there. It is a very competitive field, but if you are looking to pay someone to do this kind of work, you need to be informed.

Do some research, and ask some questions;

1.Do they themselves, carry top positions in field they represent?

2.Do they have any real references? (It is not hard to get a top placement for keywords like "top used car salesman of year award", but it IS hard to get a top listing for something like "used cars") if they have helped sites get great listings for top keywords, then they know what they are doing.

3. Do they offer a guarantee or some other sort of compensation if they can't deliver?

These are just a few things that should be considered when hiring out for SEO work, and always ask for advice, if you don't know what you are doing. Your actions can make or break your website, and your business!