Protecting your online integrity
Elise Kendall
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Saturday, 10 May 2008
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become out of date as soon as the genuine website was updated.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 Out of Date.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.
