Legal SEO problems

Can you have legal problems if you SEO for some keywords, and you don't actually have on the site what you SEOd for. E.g. you sell hard drives, and you put in the title of the page "100TB hard drive for sale" just to get clicks, yet you don't have one, and you just try to sell the regular ones. So people are basically cheated to come to your site.

Thanks,
Nick

 

You probably won't receive any traffic from the search engines in the first place because search engines look at the content of your site too before giving you rankings.If you do promise people 100TB hard drives in your content and then sell them a regular one,then you will have a legal issue.

 

Pissing off your visitors is not going to earn you money. So for this reason alone, don't misrepresent the content of your site by going after visitors who are expecting different content to what you are offering.

 

I agree with the above responses. I'm always amazed by people who have no qualms about asking: I want to do this or that dishonest trick, will I get in trouble for it? I guess they are not worried that they might lose any sleep over it. It's hard to say which is more amazing, the dishonesty or the stupidity ("yeah, they are looking for something else, but if I trick them into coming to my page, maybe they'll still buy what I have and not what they are looking for...").

 

Well the exact question was hypothetical, but let me tell you the similar stuff does work. The question is if you can get busted legally if in title of the page you have a claim that you have something on the site that you don't actually have. So people see one thing in results on google, then go to the page and page offers another thing. The content is different from the title. The page will not make them think what it offers is the same thing they saw on google. I will make sure they understand they are not getting it. Nevertheless a small percentage will get hooked. My personal view is that this is a very minor moral issue which doesn't bother me at all.

But is it legal? Can I get a qualified answer on this? Does title and meta description tags that show on Google have to legally be correspondent to the content of the actual page?

Thanks,
Nick

 

I'm pretty sure it's not illegal, it's just wrong.

 

ya me dun think it legal maybe u get banned from the search engine so careful when u do so

 

Misleading is a grey area. It can be both "Legal" and "Illegal"

1. You stated you have a 100 TB hard drive but you marked them as "Sold Out" then it would not give you any pain.

2. You stated you have a 100 TB hard drive but you posted "Just a joke, please look at 100 GB hard drive instead at this page ... blah blah" then this could make you a trouble somehow.

 

Legals maybe no, but your site would not be listed by SE if you're caught.

 

There will be no legal issue but the visitors will not buy anything from your website as the will get the image that you are a fraud.

 

if you state that you're selling computer components, then i don't think that writing "10gb hdd sold out" will create image of fraud. It has to be ~5% of such "sold outs", ofcourse.

 

Unethical is more like it.

Bait and switch does not instill customer confidence and will lead to very poor conversions.

 

Even if it it is legal, do you have the cash to pay for a lawyer if they sue you? Big companies will do that just to make your life miserable, and even if you're in the right it won't matter. Normally they will have their attorney send you a cease and desist letter first. If you get one, take them seriously. You either have to flea or fight...the choice is yours

 

Do you really think Google has time to check validity of the sites by hand? E.g. if a site makes sense? I'm almost sure they have no automatic way of flagging such a site for review ...

 

I think if somebody doing this for Search Engine Optimization purpose then he is really cheating the visitors of his side.One should use the true keywords for their website.

 

I would use a real product to get people to the site... much better ROI.

 

No, but it's in google's algorithm. You're not going to rank for terms that are not on your web page. And if you do (Google is not perfect), it

 

i dont think it is an issue.
but i have a question, do you think anybody will search for this, if searched and your page is listed, will user come back or make purchase since it is irrelevent to their search?

 

If you figure out something that is provocative enough, there will always be some part of the users that would e.g. click an ad afterwards instead of going back to google. Thats the rule of big numbers