Protecting your online integrity
In the online world, like the physical world, is important not to associate
your business with the "wrong" types of people.
I recently became aware of a website claiming to be a directory service. Subscribing to this directory would give potential customers the ability to find your website by doing a search from the directory. Sound great? The reality was far more alarming.
Rather than linking directly to the subscriber's website this directory service copied the html of the front page of the subscriber's website. In simple terms rather than looking at the website itself the pontential customer was looking at a copy of the website. A very poor copy.
Because a single page had been plagiarised the links from the copied page didn't work correctly, no special features worked correctly and the copy would become out of date as soon as the genuine website was updated. This means that any potential customer viewing this website would believe that it was 1. Not Functioning Correctly 2. Out of Date. Rather than helping potential customers find you it may only be giving you a bad reputation.
Imagine a bookstore that started selling a poorly photocopied version of your introduction and index. Unless they realise that the bookstore is dodgy it just looks like you've written a dreadful book!
Another example is an Internet Marketing company I found recently. This company claimed that some of their services were Code Optimisation and W3C Validation. Upon further investigation it turned out that not only did their homepage not validate and contained serious html errors - but none of their clients (as listed on their website) had W3C valid pages!
In the online sphere it can be difficult to know exactly who you're dealing with - it's important to make sure that the people you entrust to promote your online presence will do it in a way which preserves your online integrity.
I recently became aware of a website claiming to be a directory service. Subscribing to this directory would give potential customers the ability to find your website by doing a search from the directory. Sound great? The reality was far more alarming.
Rather than linking directly to the subscriber's website this directory service copied the html of the front page of the subscriber's website. In simple terms rather than looking at the website itself the pontential customer was looking at a copy of the website. A very poor copy.
Because a single page had been plagiarised the links from the copied page didn't work correctly, no special features worked correctly and the copy would become out of date as soon as the genuine website was updated. This means that any potential customer viewing this website would believe that it was 1. Not Functioning Correctly 2. Out of Date. Rather than helping potential customers find you it may only be giving you a bad reputation.
Imagine a bookstore that started selling a poorly photocopied version of your introduction and index. Unless they realise that the bookstore is dodgy it just looks like you've written a dreadful book!
Another example is an Internet Marketing company I found recently. This company claimed that some of their services were Code Optimisation and W3C Validation. Upon further investigation it turned out that not only did their homepage not validate and contained serious html errors - but none of their clients (as listed on their website) had W3C valid pages!
In the online sphere it can be difficult to know exactly who you're dealing with - it's important to make sure that the people you entrust to promote your online presence will do it in a way which preserves your online integrity.
Eric | Monday, 8 October 2007 10:51:46 PM
OTOH, there's always got to be a balance struck between trusting your suppliers and narking everything - I mean, your grocery store tells you your eggs are free range: you usually trust them, right? Or your drug store tells you their aspirin is the same as the other brand? You can't really do a double blind controlled study on the spot.
Things are a lot different with technology, it's so easy to check someone's credentials, but I think a lot of folks still don't realise that.
As for the first case? My god, I thought people stopped doing that in the nineties.. like the mid nineties. Well, legit people anyhow.