I’m the owner of http://www.firstbuygolf.co.uk/
I bought an extension from Mage-world. I’m not a developer, and don’t know anything about coding or Magento.
A few weeks ago, I started to learn SEO, so I reviewed my site and discovered that Mage-world by some ways had added codes to my site for their SEO purpose. You can go to my site and right click to view page source
You will see this:
<p class="welcome-msg"> <div id="mw-reference"> <h2 class="mw-reference"> Your world of <a href="http://www.mage-world.com/magento-extensions.html" title="Magento Extensions">Magento Extensions</a>, <a href="http://www.mage-world.com/magento-extensions.html" title="Magento Modules">Magento Modules</a>, <a href="http://www.mage-world.com/magento-themes.html" title="Magento Themes">Magento Themes</a> and <a href="http://www.mage-world.com/magento-themes.html" title="Magento Templates">Magento Templates</a> by Mage-World. </h2> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> var mwref = document.getElementById('mw-reference'); mwref.parentNode.removeChild(mwref); </script> </p>
When visitors go to my site, this code displays a popup and fly out of the screen right away, no one will notice it (I ask my friend who is a developer and he point it out for me).
My site loses 1 link out. That definitely will affect my page rank in Google.
Such a dishonest business! And they are Magento Partner???!!!
By using some tools, I figured out they do the same trick to many other sites that I believe are their clients. It’s bad that by using this trick Mage-world got top 9 in google for keyword “Magento”.
Please spread this post so that people will know about this trick and stay away from Mage-world!
Please don’t mislead the community. What extension did you buy from us? We have checked and see your site is in copyright violation when you use our free theme and replace our copyright without permission. Please remove our theme from your site immediately.
The text link is normal reference link of our free themes and the customer have to pay to remove the copyright and reference.
The premium themes has no reference link.
If you have any question or problem, please contact us directly via our website.
Thank you.
Wow. I always suspected this to be the case with foreign extension developers. There are worse offenders though, some of which overwrite some core functionality and when you try to upgrade Magento, poof! it all comes down.
Tips on choosing a quality extension:
1. US based options should go to the top of your list.
2. Make sure the developer has some sort of a blog and seem to know what they are talking about.
3. Check community comments and do a little search before you get their extensions, even free ones.
4. Magento certification does not mean much (see case above), but customer reviews on magento connect or any 3rd party website do!
5. Finally, even after you get the code and download the files, give the code a brief review to make sure nothing is fishy. I have seen sites hacked as a result of poorly coded extension.
I have joined to the community for some months. I don’t like to write on the forum but after reading this topic I think I must write something.
I currently use the One Step Checkout Pro from MageWorld on my store (www.cyclecase.com) and it works very well. The support team are very friendly and responsive. I highly recommend MageWorld to everyone.
Magento is really not ideal from the point of view of SEO. Very many obvious functions are implemented not quite right. As a variant, you can try the ready extensions. For example, I use this one http://mirasvit.com/magento-extensions/advanced-seo-suite.html and very satisfied with results. There are a lot of similar extensions.
