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10 Things Website Owners Lie About the Most
Monday, July 23, 2012 4:24
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Ever since the first
search engine began ranking pages, many website owners have been less than
honest about their websites. For the purposes of SEO, and several other
factors, a lot of fudging goes on- which has kept algorithms popping for some
time now at Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al.
search engine began ranking pages, many website owners have been less than
honest about their websites. For the purposes of SEO, and several other
factors, a lot of fudging goes on- which has kept algorithms popping for some
time now at Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al.
The following are ten things website
owners lie about the most:
owners lie about the most:
- Traffic – This one is hard to sneak
past search engines because of tools like Google Analytics. Site owners,
however, may try to persuade unwitting advertisers or guests that their
site is more popular than it actually is. Another common variation
of this is to use page views instead of unique site visitors to inflate
your traffic count. If you want to know how much traffic a site has,
be sure to be specific about the metric you want (visitors, unique
visitors, search only traffic, page views, etc.).
- Sales – In e-commerce, a website
owner may be tempted to exaggerate his sales in order to stimulate an
investment or gain more interest in his product or service (or more
commonly intimidate competitors). For tax purposes, however, a website
owner might want to do the opposite.
- Shipping and Handling – Another
common ploy among some internet retailers is to inflate the S&H fees
in order to increase per item profit margins. Charging well above the
postal or shipping rates needed to actually ship the product is just
outright greed.
- Security –Allowing their
certificates to expire, and failing to use adequate encryption and
security precautions, some websites are simply dishonest about how safe it
is to visit their site or make purchases there.
- Source of Content – Plagiarized,
duplicate, or spun content is rife on the interwebs. Some website
owners aren’t even honest about where they get their content from.
Software is available that will jumble the text of existing content in
order to get it to pass through Copyscape or other plagiarism checking
software.
- The Content Itself – Some website
owners have even taken to masking the text of their pages by inserting
keywords throughout the content in a font color that matches the
background. By doing this their web pages will return in a search for
those keywords, despite the fact that their website has nothing to do with
the keyword subject matter.
- Privacy Policy – While they may
promise not to sell your personal information to any third parties,
website owners will collect that and other relevant information to
establish a buying profile on you. This allows them to customize their
advertising and website to entice you to spend more.
- Website Ownership – Some website
owners, particularly those who operate outside the bounds of honest and
decent practices, will lie about the site ownership itself. They will use
dummy corporations and fake or untraceable email addresses in order to
operate with virtual impunity.
- Hyperlinks – In order to lure
visitors to a particular page some website owners will use re-directs and
false buttons on the browser window. This can be irritating or, even
worse, a security risk.
- Typosquatting – Although this can’t
accurately be regarded as outright lying, it’s a practice that is intended
to draw traffic to one’s own website when it was attempting to go
elsewhere. So it’s a more vague form of dishonesty in our book. Website
owners will buy up common misspellings of popular domains so that when
someone does misspell, that surfer is led to the owner’s site instead of
the one they had intended to type.
No matter what the
reasoning is behind the lies, lying to customers is a poor way to make profits.
As your parents always said, honesty is the best policy. A good way to ‘punish’
lying websites is to boycott their goods and services. After all, as long as
they are making a profit, they will continue in their ways.
reasoning is behind the lies, lying to customers is a poor way to make profits.
As your parents always said, honesty is the best policy. A good way to ‘punish’
lying websites is to boycott their goods and services. After all, as long as
they are making a profit, they will continue in their ways.
Contacts and sources:
Hannah Howard
http://www.longhornleads.com/blog/2012/10-things-website-owners-lie-about-the-most/
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