deliciously simple web design & creatively technical writing

Four naughty online business practices

Web usability problems are annoying, and an unusable Flash site with ridiculous navigation and other problems is galling, but an idiot web developer making your life a little bit more difficult than it has to be pales in comparison to some of the other crappy business practices on the web.

Here are just a few of them.

search engine submission parasites

What really inspired this comment is the recent letter I got in the mail from DSLCORP, which is well known for this, basically asking me for money to submit my site to search engines. I’ve had clients in the past that have received this letter and have almost paid it, thinking it was an actual bill of some kind.

internetscams.jpg

My personal opinion is that this isn’t technically fraud as they…..

a) supposedly actually do what they advertise themselves as doing

b) they do mention on the letter it is not a bill

….but it does seem like a very dishonest practice that preys on non-technical peoples’ ignorance.

Here’s an interesting writeup on search engine submission scams.

There are a few things you can do to make your sites more attractive to search engines. But if you really want to have some kind of presence on The Google, create good content that other sites link to. That is really the only real sure-fire, long-term method of success.

Small companies that misrepresent their size

There’s totally something about a lack of size that makes some men feel insecure.

I personally believe that honesty on the internet really works. Thats why I list my real name on my site and give out as much personal information as I feel safe giving out. Unfortunately I’ve seen some people who are running their own company try to misrepresent themselves by using terms like “We at ______ company would be happy to serve you” when its really just one guy running the business. It is obvious bullshit.

If you’re a one-man show, in my opinion it is always going to be blatantly obvious and you should just admit it. Don’t use the word “we” when talking about your business if you’re just one guy. I’d be more likely to buy some thing-a-ma-jig from a guy thats honest and forthright about his situation and gave me some personal information so I knew that he was legit rather than buying from somebody that was insecure about his situation and used the word “we” as a shield and didn’t disclose any information about his situation.

A legit small-company can often be more likely to provide good service because you’re just dealing with one decision-maker, not dealing with layers of bureaucracy. Thats why I’m confident offering my services against those from a bigger company. You get much better service dealing with one creator instead of dealing with (more than one) salesmen at other companies. Embrace what makes you unique and special.

Eoghan McCabe has some interesting notes on building trust online that is worth a look. I’m considering adopting some of those ideas for my own site. I first just have to figure out how to take a picture of myself without blinking when the camera flash occurs. ;)

Fake Software Awards

This is an amazing story about some of the shady practices involved in the software awards business.

This is seriously amusing.

Basically some guy wrote a fake program that did absolutely nothing and submitted it to a bunch of software awards sites, and it actually won a bunch of software awards.

In the words of Andy Brice…

The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.

Kudos to Andy for exposing this in a humorous way.

Dishonestly pimping up your viewing stats

There are some allegations that the DrudgeReport pumps up its page views by auto-reloading the page much more frequently than necessary. I have noticed the page reloading before, though I’m not certain to what extent they do this, but I’m sure that there are other sites out there that do shady stuff like this to inflate their pages viewed. Whatever the truth of Drudge specifically, and they still have an amazing amount of traffic, I don’t doubt that some companies do things to try and purposely inflate their pages viewed to try and get better advertising deals.

But with Ajax becoming more common and other good reasons, it seems like pages viewed is no longer the best metric for measuring the actual value of site blog to users. Things like number of comments, time-spent on page, frequency of visits, etc are better measures of how interesting a site is to the Interwebs.

Conclusion

Those are just a few online business practices that kinda irk me.

Posted on September 8th, 2007 by Chris Papadopoulos.

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Comments

  1. David Carr (3 comments.) @ Sep 11

    …and large companies that misrepresent their size. A bit like the car dealer who pretends to be a private seller, some companies pretend to be smaller than they really are.

  2. Chris Papadopoulos @ Sep 11

    I mostly work with some small businesses so I don’t ever see what you suggested David.

    Perhaps in some of your software work you’ve gotten a chance to see some of the questionable practices that bigger companies use and that would be interesting to read more about.

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