Paying people to bookmark your site - is that illegal??

Submitted by Tahirfayyaz on May 11, 2006 - 9:51pm in
Promotion

Hey everyone, Just wondering if it is illegal to pay people to bookmark your site on sites such as del.icio.us. Just a thought because it may help in the log run. Tahir

Uhhh. Why would that be

Submitted by nsandwich on May 12, 2006 - 3:20am.

Uhhh. Why would that be illegal? It may be a little unscrupulous but there's certainly no law against it!

I thought it may be classes

Submitted by Tahirfayyaz on May 12, 2006 - 7:31pm.

I thought it may be classes as spam. I am setting up a ecommerce site along my blog and i was thinking of offering customers a small gift voucher if they bookmark my site on del.icio.us and other bookmarking sites.

Hmmmmm...

Submitted by BlackVV on May 12, 2006 - 10:09pm.

Just from an ethical point of view, I wouldn't do it with your customers - plenty will perfectly understand why you are doing it. I'd certainly do it with other sites in the same field though.

Not the norm, but not sleazy

Submitted by noahwesley on June 5, 2006 - 3:41pm.

It sure isn't organic, but it would hardly be sleazy. Not even unethical. I would equate it to when a company hires a paid spokesperson. Your just going about it a bit differently. If you were to pay people to SPAM websites, message boards, email, etc., then yes, that would be sleazy. But del.icio.us is a personal/social bookmarking site. Users can bookmark whatever they want. Sites they like, sites from people they know, or heck, even sites someone pays them to bookmark--why not?

In the end, unless your product is quality, it will never take off despite this tactic. So, give it a shot, see what happens. Eventually, with a good product, you won't have to pay people to link your site.