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Shady Practices....

by GeorgR.
14 replies
There is a site where someone sells a clickbank product. The site is pretty simple. It ranks pretty well for a particular keyword.

What the person does:

He forces a non-closeable (!) pop-up window on any site visitor coming to the site and claims "you need to click here to win a free ipad"....forcing the visitor to click the "Google Like" button.

There is no way to get on the actual site without clicking the Like! button, you also cannot just click away that window.

Is this incredible smart (from a SEO/marketing perspective) or is it incredible shady and violating Google TOS?
#practices #shady
  • Profile picture of the author Michael Meaney
    It's very shady in my book.

    If you need to resort to that kinda stuff to get folks to take action, it's time to quit.
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  • Profile picture of the author RokDot
    This is what you call Black Hat Marketing. Sure it's smart but it's deceptive.
    I believe in internet integrity. This is just a way to get his page viral on FaceBook using a black hat method, this is smart, but something I'm against.

    I think your offers should be optional to the user, not forced upon.
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  • Profile picture of the author zabereu
    Well it`s kind of a shady but works really well, if u have an interesting post or video works well for cpa offers but if you want repeat customers or audience i prefer you stopit right now people get often frustated with these things
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  • Profile picture of the author JSanti7
    I don't think this tactic would work if you're planning on building a relationship with your visitors or customers as pop up ads are really annoying for a lot of people especially the ones that are hard to get rid of.
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  • Profile picture of the author WillR
    Silly use of technology by a silly person.

    I don't think he is smart because it's pretty easy to do but the difference is most normal people would never resort to those sorts of tactics.

    That's one I would report to Clickbank right away. It hurts everyone because if someone gets burned on one Clickbank site they will be even more weary of any other Clickbank sites they come across.
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  • Profile picture of the author Allan Leadbetter
    This might work well for someone but it would put me off, I find tricks like that pretty irritating
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  • Profile picture of the author Vlad Shelest
    Whether it's smart or not I suppose would partially depend on the CB product being promoted. In other words, who the target audience is. How web savvy are they, their age group, level of desperation (to get to the product), etc...

    Though in general terms, I wouldn't call it smart marketing. In the sense that ultimately, it's not very smart business building if you have to rely on forcing people to take certain actions only to be sold a CB product. I agree with WillR incidentally, I don't think Clickbank would look kindly at this tactic.

    This same technique, I think, is more acceptable where you have a site with high quality or specialized content and the visitor, having perhaps read a sample of the content needs to click a "like" button in order to have access to the full version. That scenario, I think, is perfectly acceptable.

    Vlad
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  • Profile picture of the author Andyhenry
    Sounds St... St.... St... Stoooopid to me.

    There aren't many better ways to have your visitors start reporting your site and avoiding you forever more. I'd also avoid the place that sent me there if I followed a link.
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    nothing to see here.

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  • Profile picture of the author showmack
    is it incredible shady! I personally do not like if someone force me to do it.
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  • Profile picture of the author winsoar
    How are they making it non closeable? I've not seen that before. Which web browser are you using?
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Baker
    There was a WSO being sold recently that was selling a wordpress plugin that did exactly the same thing. Some people will do absolutely anything to make money, even throw away their pride and musn't have any ethics at all.

    It just turns my stomach to the core.
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  • Profile picture of the author RokDot
    How do you do it?
    All you have to do is coding.
    And if you know programming it's easy.
    I could do this, but I have more integrity.
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    • Profile picture of the author chuckwells
      I would find some way to report them either to an affiliate network of a product they are promoting or the registrar of their site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Stuart william
    Site will loose traffic from regular visitors
    its completely black hat seo technique and user will not prefer to visit again
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