Ethics of the web
What are peoples thoughts on content scraping, link spamming, 302 redirects, click fraud?
Has the web just developed the same as any maturing business and anything now goes, aslong as it is not illegal, or even if it is illegal who cares as long as you don't get caught.
OR maybe we could try to make the web a Eutopia, where nothing nasty goes on.
When did it change and was it purely down to money and did we creat the hell ourselves, was it natural evolution, or was it greed.
DougS
- Y! MyWeb
I'm against it
Big surprise, eh?
Do you really believe that all other businesses are like that? If so, what purpose do organizations like the BBB have?
Not all business's are like that
But you only need one in your sector and the dynamics of the game change.
Qwerty, if all you stuff din't work and your competitors were playing "dirty" what would you do?
DougS
I don't think a mafia boss wo
I don't think a mafia boss would get much sympathy from the court if he used the competition argument.
It's all about what's legal where you live. I'm not sure where I stand if I ever set foot on American soil.
What would I do?
That depends... are we talking about my noticing before I started the project that all the competitors were "cheating" and concluding my stuff wouldn't work, or figuring this out after I've done all my stuff?
If it's the former, I'd tell the client that I could improve their site and make it more useful, but barring a decision on the part of the search engines to punish the cheating, I didn't expect to be able to make much of a dent in their rankings. And I'd probably lose the client.
If it's the latter, (which isn't likely to happen, since I look at the competition while I'm writing my proposal), I'd point out to them that I'd never guaranteed anything (which it clearly says on my site), and that at least their site is now better able to serve their customers and to convert for them. I'd then recommend they deal with the fact that they're not likely to get great rankings by advertising.