About Us

The purpose of this site is to identify legitimate prom dress retailers online through the use of an "authorized" seal, and to point out to consumers which sites are trying to sell you counterfeit prom dresses through the use of search engines.

About me:
My first (and only) job up to this point was at a prom dress shop. I worked there for most of high school, and the first two years of college before I had to start doing internships for my marketing degree. In class one day we were talking about knock-off and counterfeit merchandise, specifically dealing with the internet. I remembered how often my previous employer would complain about knock-off dresses online. So I got the idea to start a website that focuses on authorizing stores using a seal system, and pointing out impostors by using search engine optimization techniques to rank right next to them in Google. I kind of threw a site up quickly and had a huge response! Not only did retailers like the seal system, they seem to like my opinions on how to fix the counterfeit problem in the formal wear industry. So a couple website revisions later, here we are! What started off as a small project for school has kind of evolved into something awesome. I have been asked by several companies to provide ad space for them. So here are the prices...

Scope:
The purpose of TopPromWebsites is consumer awareness via two methods. The 1st is a Site Seal that we provide for free that can be used industry wide to visually show customers that a site is trustworthy. The 2nd method is to use SEO techniques to put our results in google so when a customer searches for a bad website, we will rank highly enough to get their attention. We then advise them that the site they are looking up is not legitimate, and send them to our list of trusted online retailers. Because we are maintaining a list of "bad sites," we do not want to promote or endorse them. For this reason, TopPromWebsites is set up in a way that it will not pass any "link value" to Google for linking to these bad sites.

Scope: Technical

Targeted search focusing on SERPs in Google for knock-off and counterfeit websites to advise consumers not to buy from site they are researching.
Seal system authorizing valid retailers through a 3rd party site.
Keyword research and optimization for "review" type sites.
Nofollow tags on OBL's to prevent any type of credit given to knock-off sites.
Internal page creation and site wide linking is structured in a way that we can rank highly for knock-off and counterfeit site searches, without needing keyword targeted off-site links, and without giving any type of Google credit (link juice) to the offending site.
Path-Through-Site. The typical path of a site user is: Enter from Google search of knock-off or counterfeit site --to--> Trusted Sellers page --to--> Store listed on Trusted Sellers page

Results:

The vast majority of incoming traffic is from people searching for reviews on "knock-off site" .com.
Over 50 retailers have signed up for the seal.
Site is successfully directing consumers into the authorized retail stores section (Path-Through-Site).
User submissions of knock-off sites are coming in at a rate of 3 per day (average).
The more knock-off sites that are targeted, the more traffic grows on the site, and more users are sent to the authorized retailers list.
Internal linking strategy appears to be working without the need for IBL.
Recent: Opened up the "retailers review" page for comments after retailer mentioned that she liked that customers could leave positive reviews on a third-party site about her business (Online Reputation Management)

Careful time, planning, consideration and review by my peers has gone into this website. No images or copyrighted content will be used if it violates the Fair Use Policy. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter6/index.html

Thanks for taking the time to read through the site! You can use the contact form below to write me about advertising or site suggestions. If you have a website to report, PLEASE use one of the forms on the right sidebar to submit it to the proper list :)

Mackenzie