Futurist claims Madwire mismanaged website, lawsuit says

FORT COLLINS and WESTMINSTER — Tom Frey, a noted futurist in Westminster, is suing Fort Collins-based Madwire LLC, saying its mishandling of his website lost him several speaking opportunities.

In a lawsuit filed in Larimer County District Court, Frey alleges that when Madwire launched a new website for him in April 2018, the rate of speaking inquiries he received dropped from an average of five per week to less than one. Madwire representatives were unable to explain why the loss of traffic was happening, the suit claims.

Frey claims he then hired a forensic auditor for the site months later, who determined that more than 100,000 backlinks were lost upon the new site’s launch.

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Backlinks are links embedded in one website that redirect a user to another website. Search engines view them as signs of social validation for a website and rank sites with high numbers of backlinks higher on a search result, making it a critical tool for search-engine optimization.

Frey also claims that Madwire shut down access to the site in the European Union for some time due to non-compliance with the bloc’s recently-passed General Data Protection Regulation rules but didn’t notify him of the shutdown.

The site was later shut down in November 2018, the suit claims, and Madwire refused to refund $2,625 for another website Frey had commissioned.

Saved snapshots of the website from the Internet Archive from the time show that the site went from a fully-designed landing page on Oct. 26 to a spare, white-background website on Nov. 29.

Frey is asking for damages to be determined by a jury at trial.

A Madwire spokesperson declined to comment, saying the company does not comment on litigation.

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