Creepy Internet Flattery?

Someone recently pointed out that one of the other fertility treatment providers in the area had set up a Web site with a name very similar to ours, that had “… Alabama fertility specialists…” embedded in the home page of the site. I contacted my son-in-law, who does Internet search engine optimization for a living. He said, “They’re certainly targeting your branded traffic.” I checked to see if they were doing the same trick with another fertility clinic in town – nope, just us. 

My son-in-law said to just ignore it, but my colleagues at work were upset (especially my nurse practitioner, who pointed out that they had posted some patient instructions she had written years ago). I think it’s a compliment, in a creepy sort of way, but I’m mostly sad about the matter. The reputation of the infertility treatment business is already bad enough, what with the octomom and the physician who secretly used his own sperm for inseminations (for the record, that wasn’t a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist, but rather someone who just proclaimed himself as “specializing in infertility treatment”. But I digress.) I think fertility specialists really need to be operating at the highest level of professionalism, both in real life and on the Internet.

I’m not going to post the link to the site, but you can find it by typing our name into a search engine and looking down the page. If the site has “principal investigator” misspelled, you’re there. If you find it’s spelled correctly, it means they probably read this blog.

But I hope you won’t find it at all.