Pest control in Marietta  ›  Editorial standards

This page explains where the material on this site comes from, how it gets checked, and the things we have decided not to publish. If you want the subject matter itself, start with the complete guide.

1  What we read

University extension. The entomology and extension programs at the land-grant universities across the Southeast publish most of what is actually known about the insects in this region: species biology, swarm timing, treatment approach, moisture and conducive conditions. It is written for homeowners and farmers, reviewed by people with doctorates in the subject, and it has nobody to sell. It is the first place we look and it settles most questions.

The state regulator. Structural pest control in Georgia is licensed and regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Anything on this site about licensing, the designated certified operator, employee identification cards, or what the Official Georgia Wood Infestation Report is and is not, comes from the rules themselves rather than from somebody’s summary of them.

Product labels and registration documents. When the question is what a product does, the label is the document. It carries the active ingredient, the application rate, the re-entry interval and the restrictions. Labels are public, and an operator is required to be able to produce one.

Published industry data. For things like housing stock, build eras and seasonality we use published industry and census-derived data. That is where the median build years quoted on the town pages come from. We use it for describing a market, never for telling you what a job on your own house will come to.

2  How a claim gets checked

The rule we apply is simple: go to the primary document. A trade article describing a state rule is not the state rule, and a blog describing a label is not the label. If a claim can be traced to the original, it gets traced; if it cannot, it gets cut rather than softened with “many experts say”.

Where two reputable sources disagree, we say so on the page instead of picking the version that reads better. Where something varies by house, we describe the variable rather than inventing an average. Where we are not sure, the sentence does not get written. Several things people expect to find on a site like this are missing for exactly that reason.

The local detail is checked against the county rather than assumed. Build eras, creeks and drainage, the clay itself, when the swarms happen here: those are specific and checkable, and they are what makes a page about pest control across Cobb County worth more than a paragraph that would fit any city in America.

3  What this site will not do

• We do not publish numbers an independent contractor would have to honor. We are not the company that comes to your house. Any figure we put on a page would be read as a commitment by somebody who never agreed to it, and the person holding it would be you, in an argument on your own driveway. What drives the work is published here instead: measured footage, foundation type, access, moisture, product, warranty structure, renewal terms.
• We do not rank companies, and we do not take payment for placement. We have no way to verify another business’s workmanship. A ranking we could not stand behind would be a marketing asset dressed as advice.
• We do not write reviews in invented voices. No composed testimonials, no made-up homeowners in made-up neighborhoods, no “Sarah from east Marietta”. If a quotation ever appears on this site it will be a real one, attributed.
• We do not manufacture urgency. Termites are a serious problem in Georgia and the page should say so plainly, once. Countdowns and limited-time language belong to somebody else’s business model.
• We do not let the referral arrangement touch the writing. The fee is the same whichever company you end up with, which is deliberate: a fee that varied would give us a reason to steer you. How we work sets the whole thing out.

4  What we are not

Be clear about the size of this. It is a small site written by one person who reads the extension literature and the state rules carefully. It is not a laboratory, it is not an inspection service, and it has not been in anybody’s crawlspace. Nothing here replaces a licensed inspector standing in your own house with a flashlight, and the pages say so where it matters.

Pages are dated and revised when the underlying material changes. If you find something out of date, wrong, or stated with more confidence than the evidence supports, tell us and it gets fixed. That is the whole correction policy.

Jaylan Jones — Cobb County Pest Solutions publishes independent guidance for North Georgia homeowners. We are a referral service, not a licensed pest control contractor, and we do not perform the work. How we work.