Diligence isn't just for lawyers anymore
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. This is just information that I have gleaned through experience in running a website. Take any of this information or anecdotes with a grain of salt and remember that I am not actually suggestion that you do anything. I am probably using the word ‘you’ in the same sense as the royal ‘we.’ Read at your own risk.
In the past few months I have received emails from people that they wanted to exchange ‘links.’ At first I didn’t understand why people would want to do this, if we didn’t know each other or have similar websites. But then I learned about the desire for some websites to acquire things like Pagerank and other web rank things. This practice of linking to other sites in order to gain rank is unethical and can seriously jeopardize one’s reputation and I have no idea what search engines do if they find out if people are abusing cross-linking…but I can expect that it doesn’t bode well for the searchability of articles.
So when I got the email a few months ago it basically said that the person ran a website and they liked my website and they wanted to post a link to me on their page and have a link pointing at their website on overidon.com. It sounded innocent at first, but then I did some Due Diligence and took a look at their website. They quite literally had over 500 links to other websites in the sidebar to their blog in tiny print. I instantly thought to myself, “Are you kidding me, Snoopy?”
So I sent the person an email saying, “No thanks.” And I explained how their site made no sense.
But extremely recently, I got an email from a company that wanted to purchase a link on overidon.com. I thought to myself…”Cool, someone wants to purchase an advertisement.”
I took a quick look at their website and it definitely was not a linkfarm. It actually had no outgoing links at all that I could see. It was a shareware looking web-utility site.
I sent the person an email saying hello and I told them that I sell advertising space on the right sidebar only and the prices depended on the size of the ad and the duration it will stay on the site.
I went to writer’s group and later that night I got an email back saying, that they wanted to only purchase a ‘text’ link, not a picture advertisement. And they wanted to have a quote on pricing for quarterly and yearly ad time periods.
This surprised me, because I thought that a company would take more than a a few hours to get back to me. So that raised a yellow flag in my mind. And the second suspicious thing was that the person said they only were interested in a text link, not a color advertisement.
Well, being a skeptical person, I decided to do some Due Diligence before giving any price estimates. What I found was that this shareware company had a terrible reputation on forums. The software was allegedly hard to uninstall, had minimal tech support and did not do the functions that it claimed to do.
I looked at other forums and there were a bunch of perfect “5” star ratings, with a tremendous amount of “1” star bad ratings. This was a huge red flag for me and I did more reading and many people recounted their experiences of how the company promoted its software in any way possible and claimed that it could do things, when in fact it could not.
After evaluating this information, I decided that any price would not be worth risking the small, yet adamantine reputation that we’ve established here at overidon.com. So I replied to the company and told them that we weren’t interested.
There are a lot of temptations out there for webmasters who want to gain popularity and/or incoming links. But slow growth that is based on respect will win over shortcuts every time.
-Tyler
