Thursday, January 26, 2012

EULA Be Sorry

Fan handcuffs himself to goalpost during Everton and Manchester City clash
A message on his T-shirt read: "Europe's greatest training robbers. Ryanair. Lowest wages guaranteed. Stop. Recruitment scamming our children."

If people really hate airlines there are much easier ways to harm their business than this. One way is to ask people to obey their terms and conditions.

Companies are still leaving themselves open to the being moved down search engine rankings as I described in Search Engine Deoptimization? The attack is to remove links to a website using the sites own Terms and Conditions.

1. Find if a company you are annoyed with has rule against linking to them in their Terms and Conditions. Something like 'links to this website without the prior written consent'.

2. Inform all the people who link to this website of this rule. Possibly implying you are from some sort of legal enforcement organisation.

Airlines and insurance companies love having these rules. The Idea I presume is to hinder price comparison websites.

If you do not want to go to the effort of building a spider to get the list of url's that link to a site you can google (or bing)
link:http://www.aerlingus.com

Where you replace http://www.aerlingus.com with the company website you want a list of linkers to.

The last example I used was Ryanair, mainly because so many people hate them. The following companies looked to have odd T&C from a quick read. I accept the irony of linking to people T&C that say you cannot link to their T&C.

Aer Lingus: 'to link to our site(s) only through our home page. Please do not link to other pages of our site(s) without obtaining prior written permission from Aer Lingus (such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Aer Lingus's sole discretion);'

Also World Food Program, Web Check in, Vishni capital, Glasgow 7s Rugby Team and NRMA insurance

For something like the only link to the main page rules you would need to modify the "link:" search and the scary email that tries to get the links removed.

It is easy to read the terms and conditions of competitors websites. Many competitors rankings would be harmed by removal of even a small percentage of quality links to their website. I think you could boost a client above a competitor with this technique. If I was asked to bump up an insurance companies websites search rankings I would be tempted to look at the terms and conditions of their competitors and do a "Link:" search on any of them who had these linking rules websites.

A quick google and sending some emails has to be easier than handcuffing yourself to a goalpost.

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