The following techniques may not be ethical. It is not recommended that any of these techniques be duplicated, but the intent is to inform you what techniques others may be using to market their business online. This information is presented for educational use only and is not endorsed by its author!
1. Posting help wanted when you are aren’t hiring
Employment sites receive a lot of traffic. It is suspicious how many companies tend to list the same position over and over, multiple times per week, for months and months. This especially can happen on Craigslist, where posting is still free in most cities, and traffic is VERY high. These positions suspiciously never seem to get filled, but are still listed and the company continues to receive the traffic. Are they harvesting people’s emails, resumes, and contact information? Similarly, a previous employer I worked for posted ads on various websites, including Craigslist. They then filled the position, but the positions were still advertised to the public. Did it benefit the company, drive traffic and allow a build up of candidates in the case of any future openings? Yes. Was it unethical to post something that doesn’t exist and wrong to cause harm to the seekers who tediously research the company and prepare special resumes and cover letters specifically for that position? Yes.
2. Taking content from other sites
Most everything on the internet is vulnerable for taking. In any browser you can view the html source by choosing View > Source in Internet Explorer, for instance. You can also save any web page by choosing File > Save As… (Web Page… Complete). This will take the html code, images, css files, and at times other linked files, such as javascript code. Additionally, you can download entire websites (multiple pages) by mirror software, such as the free website copier software, HTTrack ( http://www.httrack.com/ ).
So, instead of designing a site from scratch, some people find an existing site design they like, download it, and use as a template for their own site. They just modify and remove any recognizable tags and attempt to transform it into their own work.
The problem is copyright issues. Obviously, if someone spends thousands of dollars developing a website, they don’t want someone to use it. If borrowing content is ever done, permission should be asked, or else the content taken should be significantly modified to become a transformative work, and thus, fair use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ). Commercial uses are also subject to more scrutiny than a personal or educational site.
The abundance of rich text content that is free in the public domain may explain why Wikipedia is copied so much by other websites. People frequently harvest this public domain content and use it on their own site to try to increase their organic traffic and make money off their ads. Answers.com even does it and says it plainly. Imagine the cost for a company to actually produce their own content!
Wikipedia is duplicated so much, however, it’s possible your content may not be considered ‘original’ by Google, thus having a harder time ranking well. It is also something the website Copyscape would find. Those that are successful in harvesting content for their website will do a mashup, combining multiple sources of data, where your content could then become a seemingly original work.
3. Using your competitor’s content against them
Some websites take their competitor’s products, description, and part number information and use them to advertise on webpages showing their own products. For example, one client I had gathered all of its competitor part numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. These part numbers were then incorporated into their own website, and each part number represented a new web page. Using the part numbers as the keyword, thousands of pages were submitted, and it then started receiving more traffic and sales- often showing up when the competitors were not showing up in search engines at all. For information on how best to optimize your website, visit: http://www.trentmueller.com/5-Essential-Tips-for-Great-SEO_Article/ To build thousands of optimized pages from an Excel spreadsheet, you will need to use a database such as MySQL, then use a mod rewrite to modify all of the URLs for SEO. Just do a Google search for “mod rewrite” and “seo” and “htaccess” and you’ll eventually get it. I will probably make a posting in the future about how to do it, so feel free to subscribe to this blog for updates. But again, this practice of using competitors information against them is not encouraged.
Those are three evil web marketing tricks out there. If you search, I’m sure you can find many more. Maybe this information can help protect you from the other evil marketers out there. But don’t fall to the dark side yourself!