#16: Broken Links and Broken Trust: The Cost of Bad Tech Partnerships

In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken shares two real-world stories from just the past week that spotlight a growing problem in the digital landscape: service providers that simply aren’t ready for the credibility demands of the AI era.

First up is a vacation rental platform that forces businesses to host booking pages off their own domain—eliminating any SEO benefit and causing a jarring trust gap for users who click away from the brand’s site. Then, Ken dives into the frustrating experience of trying to reclaim a domain name on behalf of a client, only to be met with untrained, unhelpful support from the provider.

These aren’t just isolated issues—they reflect a deeper shift. As AI systems increasingly reward authority, trust, and user signals, outdated tools and poor service aren’t just inconvenient—they’re liabilities. If your tech stack or partners aren’t built for visibility, trust, and integration, you’re already falling behind.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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Welcome to Over the Bull. I'm your host, Ken, and I hope you're going to have a happy 4th of July. I'm looking forward to spending the 4th with family and friends and We always have a big get-together with our family. We try to do it once a month, and this month we're going to enjoy that again. And I hope your family and friends are healthy, and I hope you're going to have just a blessed Fourth of July. Now, I was debating on what exactly to talk about this week in Over the Bull, because, frankly, there's so much going on that it can be overwhelming to And honestly, it can have you think you're going crazy sometimes. So I thought I'd share a few stories with you. And this may be relevant to you or may not, but maybe it'll help you get a little better insight into what this Internet world looks like today. So we signed a recent, a client recently. And they're local. And one thing that they do is they sell vacation rentals, so short-time rentals you see on places like Airbnb or Vrbo. And one thing that they have is a booking engine. So let me talk about this just for a second. So you can imagine that if you have a website with rentals and then you have the same properties listed on Airbnb or you have them listed on Vrbo or other places, that you don't want to have double bookings and you want to be able to manage everything from a central location just to help things run smooth and efficient and keep people happy and all those things. Similar in the tourism industry. You know, we have what we call OTAs, and those OTAs are like TripAdvisor or Groupon, you know, Viator, things like that. And it's the same thing. You know, you can only book so many tickets, and if somebody books on Groupon and then TripAdvisor, and if you don't have a way to kind of collectively manage all that information, you could overbook or have a lot of issues that could negatively impact your company. So in this case, she had a program that they use. And that particular program, what it did was it was that booking engine. And so the idea is that when you went to her website and then you start to go through the different rentals she has, and then you click the book button, it would take you over to... this other website where the booking engine resides. So if you could imagine if the website is mytravelcompany.com, it would, when you clicked on the booking part, it would take you to a completely different website with all that stuff on it. Now, there were two problems when I investigated the website. Because you see, you have to look at it from multiple angles. You can't just look at it from, Does it work? You have to ask the questions of, does it positively impact the booking process? Does it negatively impact the booking process? And does it help with things like search engine optimization? Does it not do good with it? And can you track all the meaningful events so that you can optimize for those conversions? And so there's just a lot of moving pieces. Now, When you click and you go to that other site, so when they click book and they would go to that site, the problem was multifaceted. The first problem was you jump web addresses. So you go from abc.com to def.com. And at a glance, you may think, well, that's not really a big deal. However, it is a big deal. Keep in mind, All the junk that's going on today on the internet, think of all the spam and, for lack of a better word, just incompetence. I mean, I see a lot of incompetence when I'm dealing with vendors and third parties, and I'm seeing them trying to wield this AI thing, and they're doing a really bad job of it. And so the big companies are doing a really bad job. The little companies are doing a bad job. Then you get the cold emails, you get the spam phone calls, you get the text messages. And so people, their radar is higher than ever. And instead of them looking for a reason to book with you, they look for the reasons not to trust you because they're bombarded with scams all the time. So in the booking process, if you jump from website abc.com to def.com, That's a flag. And a lot of times people will think twice about booking when it jumps web addresses like that, because it's just that one little thing that makes them go, can I trust this website? Why did it do that? What are they trying to pull over on me? You know, those are the questions that basically bounce around in someone's mind. And so it impacts the buying cycle. It can negatively impact it by a little bit or a lot, but until you correct it, you don't know exactly how detrimental that is. The second thing is when you do all that work to put together all those properties inside that booking engine, all the content, meaning text and photos and videos or highlights, whatever, all those things, And then you link it to that other site or you click over to the other site. Those pages become valueless in terms of search engine optimization. And in other words, you're doing all the work. You really should get the SEO credit for the work, meaning that you want to build your credibility. Because if you looked at the last podcast we had, one of the big things that's going on right now is this This hurricane called artificial intelligence that's on the horizon. And these big tech companies, man, they're drunk on this thing. And the idea is that they're moving harder and harder into it. They're petitioning for, I mean, entire energy components just to drive this darn thing. And so the idea is from a search engine optimization and AI, you want to build your credibility up too. And so credibility a lot of times is content. And so just by linking to a site and them saying that they market as non-indexable, why sure, that's good in one respect in that Google will not look at the pages, right? But in another way, it's really bad because you don't get any credit for all the hard work and you don't build your credibility up from all the hard work. And so even though technically you can do it, you know, it kind of goes back to, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, it's not can we do it, it's should we do it. You know, it's kind of like that kind of thing. And should we? And so the idea is you want to, when you're thinking about the web work, you really want to think about the entire experience from a technical, from a marketing, an aesthetic, the whole gamut. And if you're working with an SEO guy who doesn't understand it, then you're going to miss pieces. And if you work with a design person that don't get the technical parts, you're going to miss other pieces. And that list goes on and on and on. And so now it becomes, rather than just the dogmatic reality that that's just the way it is, now it transitions to politics, where we're trying to justify our little piece of the pie because we don't want to lose our little piece of the pie. But in reality, all those things matter. And if you hire different people in different situations to do that, then it's going to be disconnected. So in here, we see two obvious points of disconnect that really need to be resolved. Now, we started looking at other solutions that could accommodate what this client needs and to fill the gaps. This was followed by the client asked me to reach back out to their current provider for the software and just ask the simple question. One, can we create it to where they don't leave the website during the booking process? Number two, can we get credit for the search engine optimization? Now, when you do that, believe it or not, there are different ways to put stuff on your website, that content, in one way that's meaningful and another way that's meaningless. And so even if it looks like it's on your website, you may not still be getting the credit for it. If you're in the industry, think the word iframe. Iframe is not the ideal way to do it. So I got on the phone with them, and I'm talking to... The guy that was supposed to be there wasn't there, and it was somebody else, but he was one of their apparently lead techs. And I asked him the question to just basically say, can you do this? And this person went on a diatribe of, my goodness, probably 15 minutes, and he was making a word salad mix mash of terms and concepts and He was blending together paid ad concepts with organic concepts. He was minimizing the domains jumping. He minimized the whole argument, trying to in his mind anyway, because he's defending the product. And it was absolutely crazy. And I realized a few things. The first thing that I realized is that If I was not in the position that I'm in and I don't have the experience that I have, I might have bought part of what he said. Now, this is a big problem for a lot of you guys because you're buying the best argument. And I've had clients in the past that if they were on that conversation, they may have bought what this particular person was saying. Even though it's 100% just... a word salad of nonsensical, technical-sounding knowledge. And it was crazy because then he tried to transition the conversation to where it's like a philosophical difference in the way you develop, when in reality, it's just dogmatically true. You want to seal as many holes as you can seal in your marketing program. Make the... the buying process as seamless as possible for the client. And don't raise any flags that may prevent the client from trusting your business. Very basic concepts. And so anyway, he tried to do all this marginalization of it. And it made me realize how tough of a job you guys have when you're trying to run a business. Because a lot of times, The stuff that's coming from the people that are selling and supporting your product, it's just wrong. I don't know of any other way to put it. So the idea is when you look at any kind of software, and this would go out to electricians. It goes out to plumbers. It would go out to anybody in the tourism industry. It goes out to anyone who does vacation rentals, any kind of tradesmen. is that when you start to integrate third-party tools, it's essential that it's seamless. And it's just as essential that you're able to track meaningful actions all the way through because paid ads like Google, what they do is when you set conversions. So conversions is just a fancy way to say, I'm trying to get phone calls. I want people to fill out a form. I want people to sign up for this. Those are conversions, okay? There are different levels of conversions, and you really should focus on the important conversions, by the way. I see a lot of people in Google Ads, businesses who focus on like a click on a button that really doesn't mean that much. And the problem is you're kind of messing with Google's artificial intelligence with conversions. paid ads when you put those meaningless conversions in there because it starts to optimize for the meaningless conversion as much as the meaningful, and you can actually trip up Google Ads if you're not careful in how you do that. But the idea is that when you're looking at software, you really need to ask a couple of questions. One, does it blend seamlessly with my website? Number two, Ask, does it use iframes or does the content appear native to my website? Now, that's kind of interesting because iframes, if you think about it, if you took a piece of paper and punched a hole in it and then showed another piece of paper behind it, you're basically not actually putting that paper together. What you're doing is just showing a window of the paper behind the piece of paper, right? And so... When you do iframes, you're kind of doing that. And rather than actually have the content where it appears to be nested or embedded onto the website. The other thing you want to do is make sure that it's seamless and that it fits the buying profile. Don't just look at it from one lens. Sit back and go, okay, I'm a customer and I'm doing this. So a lot of these booking widgets that come from, especially in plumbing and electrical websites, they'll put a password before you can go through and book. They want you to put in a password or username or something like that. And if you think like a customer, that's a barrier. You might think that's easy, but this person may be the first time they're wanting to use you and you're requiring them to do something and get in the way of them booking. You see, that's not a good experience. And so you want to think about the experience. You want to make sure the content is native. And then you want to make sure that you can track meaningful actions. Now, the word in the industry is conversions. If you're in the meta world, you can use the word events. So Facebook and stuff like that. But you want to make sure that you can do that. And if you get this word salad. minimizing the concern, or if you see an experience issue or a little bump in the road and you're getting heavy resistance from that, it may be time to start looking for other software in those cases. Matter of fact, it's really important. So in the case of this particular client, over half of their bookings, a big segment of it, doesn't come from their website. It comes from other sources. And so by running paid ads or running different kind of advertising that would go through that website, while if they're booking on something like Vrbo, for example, it could impact on one level, especially if people are finding them on Vrbo. While if you're sending it directly to the website and it jumps website addresses or it has these glitches, It could be much, much of a larger issue when you're trying to make those things work. You could have potential customers dropping off, and you could lose a large amount of sales from something that you've not thought through carefully. The other thing is you want to be making sure that whenever you incorporate something like that, that it feels like it's your stuff. meaning that you want to make sure you can brand it. You want to make sure that it doesn't feel like that there's a thing on your website that doesn't match your website. Like if your website is blue, you want to make sure that you don't have a neon green on a certain page where it's branded to the vendor's colors. These are all mistakes, and sometimes you do have to pick your battles, and that's just the way it is. Now, if we zoom out a little bit, This situation also presents a much larger problem that's going to become bigger and bigger as things like Gemini and ChatGPT and these other AI models evolve. One of the things you're going to see is that you can tell that these companies that have thousands of customers are not prepared for what's coming. They're not thinking about your citation or your credibility. They're selling right into this storm and they're not addressing issues. And remember, citations and credibility, that's the new currency here, guys. This is the new currency of the future. If you're not credible and you're just running paid ads to a landing page and you're doing all these things and thinking you have it figured out, this storm is going to catch you. And you need to make sure that you're building the credibility for your company, your website, your Google business profile, your social media, and you do not want to be caught in this hurricane when it hits. And so that's all about credibility. So as you're dealing with vendors, keep in mind that they may not have their hand on the pulse of this or they may not be able to react. I mean, the amount of code that would take to do some of these things, Although it may seem simple, it actually can be fairly complex to do these things. Now, I want to bookend that part of the conversation, and I want to move over to another one too. So there's this other company that does menus for restaurants, and it was another strange issue. So it boiled down to this. The client that signed up with us was using this company, that builds menus and these kind of rudimentary restaurant-style websites. And what they did was they also managed their domain or web address. Now, what's interesting about that is that that domain or web address, she wanted us to manage it. She wanted us to take that over. So she didn't want that company to do it any longer. So I get into a chat. And in that chat, the funny thing is, is that the person was not technical at all. So they're in technical support, but they were really not. So let me give this to you a couple ways. So one is, if you want to transfer your web address to another company, that's a lot different than just pointing out the new web information inside that domain. So you could maintain control of it or you can give the whole thing away, the whole web address. And we wanted the whole web address. Well, I was on the phone with the client trying to get this resolved because I was curious if they were even going to release the domain given the language because the language implied they were avoiding the question of giving her information her actual web address, meaning that they would change stuff for her but not give it to her. You see, that's a huge difference. And so I read the language, I got on the phone, and I spent the next 45 minutes to an hour in this chat, and oh man, two sentences and I was waiting 20 minutes. And the only way we were able to find it was... their customer support number because the chat was crazy and she kept mixing up those two processes. And so it was really weird and we were talking about getting a transfer and then at one point this person said that they would release the domain without asking us where to release it to. Just very fundamental, crazy stuff. And as I'm sitting here doing that and working through it, the one thing that that I had seen was that they didn't know. And then anyway, the client was, as we were talking on the phone, we were joking, kind of laughing about how slow it was. And at some point, guys, you just have to laugh. I mean, and my point to the client was I said, you know, I value my time. And this person, just to give you a simple answer, is taking 45 minutes of time. And we were going to still use them for part of their service. But once experiencing that, we decided not to. So here's the kicker. We did get a customer support phone number. Now, it's not published on this company's website. I wish I was kidding. It was actually a website called pissedconsumers.com. Forgive the language, but that's the web address, pissedconsumers.com. And believe it or not, their customer support number was there. And then we called in, and we got a hold of a great person on the phone. You know, it's hit or miss. Got a hold of just an awesome person. We got control of the domain name and we got everything going. But it was literally a disaster to try to get control of her assets. So the idea here is you want to be careful with domain names. That's your web address. Your website, you can figure that part out, but your domain name is the crux of your business. And if you're building credibility, the domain name is that linchpin. And so you want to be careful who you give control of that domain to. You don't want to let a freelancer have that domain name and manage it on your behalf. You want to have extreme confidence that that person is not going to run away with your domain or worse, not worse, that's just that's bad, but hold you hostage, meaning that I'm going to take this and I'm just going to keep it. Now, I have seen both of those things. So keep your domain under your control. And if you register with a company like GoDaddy, now keep in mind, some of these, GoDaddy is what you call a registrar. Now, they do other stuff. My personal opinion is they're really good on domains. I don't like a lot of the other stuff that they do. That's my personal opinion. But they have really good domain services. And one of those things that you can do is share parts of your account with your freelancer and still maintain full control of your domain name. And we actually produce a video where we share it out with the client and say, if you don't trust us, this is how you can share it out and still maintain control of it. And so it was kind of scary. So it turned out in the end that they did release it, but the language that the person was using implied that they were avoiding kind of the question. And so it could have easily been the other way where they said, well, we're not going to give it to you. And then you may think, well, but they're doing that service for me. But in this crazy world of domains, very easily the person who has the ownership of it, they own it. And sometimes it's really, really difficult to get those things back. And if you get a hold of the wrong person, with the wrong intents, you're going to have a bear of a time and you may even have to start completely over. And in this world of artificial intelligence, these large language models, when you reset something like that and you're resetting your credibility, it's not just putting out another web address, guys. What this means is you're restarting your credibility. All those people that have your website down, they're going to be confused. So be very careful about who you trust with it. And I've seen big companies get into trouble with this, and I've seen mom and pops get into trouble with this. You want to work with companies that are reputable, and you do want to get something where you know that you know that you know that that's yours and that they have to give that over. Now, keep in mind, they can still make your life incredibly miserable. And they could come in and try to charge you a lot of money on the back end just to transfer that over to you. So you want to be careful about that. And you want to make sure you maintain your domain name. And your domain is just your web address. That's not your actual website. That's just your web address. And if you go to our website and you go to different places, you can kind of see basic schematics of what a website comprises of. And so as I'm going through this, business this week. These were two issues that I saw, and what it made me realize is that big companies and small tech companies, they're not prepared for what's getting ready to come. I'm not sure if they can react to it. Also, the degree at which things are being supported is going downhill quickly, and the amount of, I guess for lack of a better word, Apparent deceptiveness in some ways, that's going through the roof, and I think you probably see that on your end too. And what you want to do is you want to be sure that your business, when it comes to how people see it online and how they engage with it, leaves zero doubt that your business is reputable and dependable. Okay, guys, that's all I'm going to talk about today. I hope you have a great 4th of July. I hope this helps you out. Like I say, I'm just talking about things that come across our agency on a weekly basis. God bless, and until next time we meet, this is Ken Carroll with Over the Bull.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.