Anyone know who runs colorado-solar.org?
April 21, 2014 9:45 AM   Subscribe

As a consumer I'm evaluating their bias in helping me find installers, but I can't find it's affiliations & organizational structure.

colorado-solar.org whois info puts the host as Search Strategies Inc out of Boulder, but that doesn't help much. Their about page is a vacant description of what they do without any useful information about the real organization. No phone or addresses are listed. Googing "colorado-solar.org" doesn't give me much useful info either.
posted by wonderfullyrich to Shopping (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I don't know who runs it, but my guess is it's someone trying to make a buck off google searchers, either by paid referrals or some other way. Here's what I found:

(1) Google searching for "colorado-solar.org" led me to this privacy policy page at california-solar.org, which lists a contact email address as info@colorado-solar.org.

(2) Other search results take me to this LinkedIn page, where the person's work history includes "Web Content Writer at Search Strategies, Inc" with duties like:

• Researched and analyzed academic journals, news articles and additional web sources to create compelling content for california-solar.org, colorado-solar.org, teaching-certification.com, masters-education.com, marketing-schools.org and allpsychologycareers.com.
• Led content creation at colorado-solar.org and california-solar.org, producing over 40 articles on how solar panels work, the process of installing solar panels, financing options,and state policies.
• Wrote three blog posts weekly on colorado-solar.org and california-solar.org, updating readers with current news in the solar industry, tips on saving energy, climate change topics and beyond.
• Edited up to 10 articles per week written by contract writers, working with them to understand their mistakes and make necessary adjustments while also meeting my own writing deadlines.
• Engaged in successful link building outreach campaigns, sending emails to interested parties informing them about website projects and increasing traffic to Search Strategies websites.


(3) I tried to check out their page at the Internet Archive, only to see that the Archive crawler is blocked from accessing the site.

You could always send an email to info@colorad-solar.org for more details, but based on what I've seen, I wouldn't expect an unbiased directory of all solar installers in Colorado. Whether or not it's actually scammy/spammy, I can't tell.
posted by griseus at 10:38 AM on April 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: griseus, nice research and creative troubleshooting! That's further than I got, and it agrees with what I'm thinking. I did send them a request for more details, but I'm guessing I will either get a form letter or no response.
posted by wonderfullyrich at 10:48 AM on April 21, 2014


Whois returns one Seth Sanford of Search Strategies Inc. Sounds spammy to me.
posted by bfranklin at 1:01 PM on April 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


The site has a lot more than your typical spammy landing page trying to make some bucks from Google ads. In fact there are no ads on the site that I can see.

Just randomly selecting a few cities you get a pretty long list of installers and it includes some nationally known companies. However not all the companies listed are actually installers. To me it looks like they're scrapping company data from other websites to populate their database.

I would guess it's a genuine attempt to aggregate solar companies together into a single site to help consumers. If anything it looks like they're presenting 'everything' they can find for a given area rather than promoting certain companies over others. Also their list is alphabetical, so they're not even promoting companies by list order.

Solar has a lot of passionate people that just want to see it succeed, it wouldn't surprise me if this site isn't evidence of that kind of advocate doing something on their own dime to advance the cause.
posted by Long Way To Go at 8:48 PM on April 21, 2014


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