Someone has been posting official (and therefore positive) TEFL International videos on YouTube with the keywords “scam” and “blacklist” all over the them, presumably with the aim of pushing posts which really claim that TEFL International is a scam or should be blacklisted off the top page of Google searches. In the unlikely event that worked, wouldn’t that make anyone with two brain cells suspicious about why a page of videos with such keywords existed??
To give my own conclusions on the questions posed by those keywords, I would reserve the word “scam” for schools which don’t provide training at all for the money you send or who make totally false claims about the qualification you obtain (e.g. “Accredited by IATEFL”). The former is certainly not true of TEFL International. The latter is debatable, but there are far worse out there. They are guilty of seven sins on my list of definitions of dodgy TEFL courses, however.
TEFLtastic 
I guess as long as people are googling for “tefl international scam” you may as well set up your own page(s) to capture that keyphrase. At least it comes up on the first page of my Google results (9th place).
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Like I said, sounds like a good idea initially but when you end up on the page it just seems weird and, I would imagine, offputting by its existence and the strange combination of negative words and positive videos.
I can tell you for sure that plenty of people google “Don’t do the CELTA” as well, but Cambridge are hardly likely to do tacky stuff like this. Which, as it happens, is the topic of my next post…
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Alex – my comment was facetious :)
Dead right, CELTA wouldn’t stoop to tacky techniques like this.
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I did that search and to be fair it seems all those complaints are not only very questionable (do people still think TEFLWatch was a legitimate site run by a sane person? It is still quoted on a few of those sites) the complaints are all years old. With the size of TEFL International, if they were indeed a scam, there would be complaints coming monthly.
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The same person is also posting the videos with “Tefl International is not a scam”
It’s such a daft idea that I think it is more likely to be a mischief maker at work than some clumsy attempt to drive criticism off the search engine results.
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Having thought about it, it is probably yet another example of the dangers of affiliate marketing. Whoever it is (and I’m starting to think one person started it and others copied) gets paid every time someone clicks on the link to the official TEFL International site, and TEFL International probably don’t know and/ or don’t care what is written on the sites that send clicks their way.
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I hadn’t thought of affiliates- you could be right.
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And now someone is trying to leave spam comments under the name “tefl scams,tefl international,reviews,tefl blacklist” but with totally un-TEFL-related comments and pages they are linking to. Curiouser and curiouser.
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