On September 11, 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Botox Cosmetic (onabotulinumtoxinA) for use in the reduction of crow's feet. It is currently the only drug treatment approved by the FDA for this usage.
Since 2002, Botox Cosmetic has been approved for the temporary improvement of frown lines between the eyebrows.
“This additional indication will provide people with a new FDA approved
treatment option for those seeking a smoother appearance by temporarily
minimizing the appearance of crow’s feet at the sides of the eyes,” said Susan
Walker, M.D., director of the Division of Dermatology and Dental Products in the
FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Botox Cosmetic is administered via intramuscular injections. Treatment for
both frown lines and crow’s feet can be given at the same time.
Botox Cosmetic is manufactured by Allergan Inc. based in Irvine,
Calif.
This information was extracted from an FDA press release:
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” wrote Walt Whitman, America’s great bard of self-promotion. As the world goes ever more digital, quite a few businesses are adopting that philosophy — hiring a veritable chorus of touts to sing their nonexistent praises and lure in customers.
Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, called the deceptions “worse than old-fashioned false advertising.”
New York regulators will announce on Monday the most comprehensive crackdown to date on deceptive
reviews on the Internet. Agreements have been reached with 19 companies to cease their misleading practices and pay a total of $350,000 in penalties.
The yearlong investigation encompassed companies that create fake reviews as well as the clients that buy them. Among those signing the agreements are a charter bus operator, a teeth-whitening service, a laser hair-removal chain and an adult entertainment club. Also signing are several reputation-enhancement firms that place fraudulent reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Citysearch and Yahoo.
A phony review of a restaurant may lead to a bad meal, which is disappointing. But the investigation uncovered a wide range of services buying fake reviews that could do more permanent damage: dentists, lawyers, even an ultrasound clinic.
“What we’ve found is even worse than old-fashioned false advertising,” said Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. “When you look at a billboard, you can tell it’s a paid advertisement — but on Yelp or Citysearch, you assume you’re reading authentic consumer opinions, making this practice even more deceiving.”
Investigators working for Mr. Schneiderman began by posing as the owner of a Brooklyn yogurt shop that was the victim of unfair reviews. Could the reputation management firm gin up some good reviews to drown out the naysayers?
All too often the answer was yes. The investigation revealed a web of deceit in which reviewers in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Eastern Europe produced, for as little as a dollar a rave, buckets of praise for places they had never seen in countries where they had never been.
In some cases, the reputation shops bribed their clients’ customers to write more fake reviews, giving them $50 gift certificates for their trouble. They also went on review sites that criticized their own fake-review operations and wrote fake reviews denying they wrote fake reviews.
The investigation was aimed at companies based in New York, but it will have a wider reach. “This shows that fake reviews are a legitimate target of law enforcement,” said Aaron Schur, senior litigation counsel for Yelp, which has taken an aggressive approach in screening out reviews it believes to be false. Yelp recently sued a California law firm for writing fake reviews of itself.
Within recent memory, reviewing was something professionals did. The Internet changed that, letting anyone with a well-reasoned opinion or a half-baked attitude have his say. Web sites loved this content, because it was free. So consumer reviews became ever more ubiquitous — and influential.
Reviews persuade people to try a new resort or shun an old restaurant. They sell books and the devices the books are read on. They influence the choice of garden tools, plumbers, high fashion and, increasingly, doctors. If you provide a service or sell a product and you are not reviewed, you might as well not exist.
In a 2011 Harvard Business School study, a researcher found that restaurants that increased their ranking on Yelp by one star raised their revenues by 5 to 9 percent. A 2012 Gartner study estimated that one in seven recommendations or ratings on social media sites like Facebook would soon be fake. And there have been instances where all the reviews of a product have been secretly bought and paid for by the seller of the product.
Some retailers and other sites that feature many reviews have largely ignored the problem, perhaps not wanting to scare away real customers. Others have been like Yelp and been more forceful in addressing the problem.
But the New York investigation shows that the fakers are constantly increasing in sophistication. “Do not make them sound like an advertisement,” one firm investigated by the attorney general cautioned its writers. Another boasted of using multiple computers to foil suspicions that arose when more than one review came from the same machine. A third talked of outwitting Facebook.
“Sadly, it will take continued policing, both by law enforcement and the review sites themselves, to make sure some businesses stop lying to customers they claim to serve,” Mr. Schneiderman said.
Fake reviews undermine the credibility of the Internet. Olivia Roat, a marketing consultant for Main Street Host, a Buffalo digital marketing agency, discussed her growing realization that fake reviews are omnipresent on the company’s blog last year. “Say it ain’t so!” she wrote. Who, she wondered, could be trusted?
Apparently not Main Street Host, which was one of the 19 companies that signed an agreement to desist. The agreement says Main Street Host “engaged in astroturfing on behalf of over 30 clients,” using a term referring to writing fake reviews. Executives there could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
For the service companies, buying reviews seems a shortcut to the better reputation they are unlikely to achieve on their own.
US Coachways, another company in the investigation, is a charter bus service based in Staten Island. If a prospective customer were to look on Yelp, she might get the sense that this is not an outfit she would want to hire.
“This company basically ruined what was otherwise a great trip,” wrote a typical reviewer in 2012.
Currently, the company has 14 reviews averaging one star. It is not possible to get much lower than this.
Edward Telmany, US Coachways’s chief executive, was upset about the low ratings, according to the formal Assurance of Discontinuance he signed with the attorney general’s office.
“We get bashed online,” Mr. Telmany wrote, accurately, to his employees on Nov. 20, 2011. “We are loosing [sic] money from this.”
His response was not to fix the problems that customers were citing, like buses never showing up, but to begin a full-fledged effort to get fake reviews. Mr. Telmany hired freelance writers, mandated that his employees write favorable reviews and even pitched in himself. He posted a five-star review on Yelp that began, “US Coachways does a great job!”
Neither Mr. Telmany nor a spokesman for US Coachways could be reached for comment on Sunday. The company agreed to pay $75,000 in fines and stop writing fake reviews.
Faking reviews often begins with faked reviews of the company faking the reviews. In October 2010, a review appeared on Yahoo that said the writer was “thrilled” by the services provided by Main Street Host. He added that he just didn’t understand “why this company gets all the negative reviews.” He also said, “for the record, I am not a Mainstreethost.com employee, don’t know anyone who is, and have no knowledge of anyone else’s experience but my own.”
The review was, of course, by a Main Street Host employee. The company agreed to a $43,000 fine.
A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You.
By Richard Taylor North
America Technology Correspondent
Google has unveiled an
upgrade to the way it interprets users' search requests.
The new algorithm,
codenamed Hummingbird, is the first major upgrade for three years.
It has already been in
use for about a month, and affects about 90% of Google searches.
At a presentation on
Thursday, the search giant was short on specifics but said Hummingbird is
especially useful for longer and more complex queries.
Google stressed that a
new algorithm is important as users expect more natural and conversational
interactions with a search engine - for example, using their voice to speak
requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable technology.
Hummingbird is focused
more on ranking information based on a more intelligent understanding of search
requests, unlike its predecessor, Caffeine, which was targeted at better
indexing of websites.
It is more capable of
understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than simply
words, which leads to more fluid interactions. In that sense, it is an
extension of Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept introduced last year
aimed at making interactions more human.
In one example, shown
at the presentation, a Google executive showed off a voice search through her
mobile phone, asking for pictures of the Eiffel Tower. After the pictures
appeared, she then asked how tall it was. After Google correctly spoke back the
correct answer, she then asked "show me pictures of the construction"
- at which point a list of images appeared.
Big
payoffs?
However, one search
expert cautioned that it was too early to determine Hummingbird's impact.
"For me this is more of a coming out party, rather than making me think
'wow', said Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land.
"If you've been
watching this space, you'd have already seen how they've integrated it into the
[predictive search app] Google Now and conversational search.
"To know that
they've put this technology further into their index may have some big payoffs
but we'll just have to see how it plays out," Mr Sullivan said.
The news was announced
at an intimate press event at the Silicon Valley garage where founders Sergei
Brin and Larry Page worked on the launch of the search engine, which is fifteen
years old on Friday.
At the event, the search behemoth
also announced an updated search app on Apple's iOS, as well as a more visible
presence for voice search on its home page.
Searcher locality is starting to influence regular search results for almost every query. Because this location is auto-detected you can't omit it from a search. You can only change is to another location within your country.
Even very generic searches are influenced in extreme ways. That is why local links are getting more important, also for your important keywords.
The example below shows how a very generic search for "www" (which I use to get generic authorities from Google) returns "dortmund" specific authorities first, just because my proxy is located there.
You can try your own examples in English on Google.co.uk (Google.com only works for US readers, while UK allows locality for everyone). Set your "Search tools" -> "Search near …" to any UK city to see how that influences the results. https://www.google.co.uk/#changed_loc=1&q=www. Non-UK visitors need to set it manually, but UK visitors aren't able to get results without their locality as a personalization factor.
How Does This Change SEO
To dominate a search theme for every visitor from any location, adding city-specific pages and texts to your website increases your chances. City-specific links also seem to increase your chance, even when you leave out any textual reference to the city on your site.
So what is local link building and how do you acquire locality relevant links? For years I've been active in local link building for websites like job portals, business listings, and other sites that cover multiple locations.
Link Building for Location Relevance
Location relevance needs to be addressed city-by-city. Some cities will have a positive effect on their boroughs and neighboring cities, so it is logical to focus on larger cities first.
When you Google for just a city name you get results like:
Local government and public services (e.g. town hall, fire department, and local transport).
Universities and schools.
Tourist information.
Sport clubs and associations (e.g. football club, hobby clubs, and churches).
Local news (e.g. papers, radio, TV).
Recurring local events (e.g., marathon or conference).
These websites are the most important link partners for a city name. A strategy focused on a service in one city can probably be copied to the same service in each individual city. Here are a few examples:
Sponsor the local fire department: For a job portal I created information about hiring volunteer and on-call firemen that can be summoned at any time for emergencies and need to train often and hard. This requires a lot of flexibility from employers, so we created a list of attractive employers that would hire on-call people. Many fire department websites added our information and links to their "join the brigade" sections.
Sponsor a couple of smaller local events: Bigger events might bring you more link value, but their sponsorship can also become very expensive. If link value is the thing you are after you can probably sponsor smaller material things that the organization needs and still get a link in return (just not on the main sponsor page). Smaller events are often much happier with your sponsorship and they don't realize that they can bring you some hard to grasp concept like local link value. You can ask for almost anything on their website.
Buy old campaign websites: Local government often links to information campaigns that are no longer active and local elections also involve domains with no future use. Contact the current owner and take control over all that link value.
Be Local
Even if you offer your services nationwide, Google has hereby declared being local an important ranking factor. Do whatever you can to cover the most important cities before some smaller local player takes your place. Prepare for the increasing role of local!
Many consider one of the most effective and minimally invasive cosmetic procedures today to be the use of Botox™. After many years on the market, widespread use attests to its appeal for everyday people. Application is simple and relatively pain-free.
Perhaps its popularity and ease of use explains why Botox use for cosmetic
purposes is expanding into places you might not expect, such as the office of your dentist or other medical specialist. While it must be used by a trained and licensed professional, the list of authorized locations is continually growing.
The questions you might ask are:
Is Botox safe?
Where can I find Botox in my area?
What is Botox?
To find out these answers and more, consult your local Botox clinic.
