In Wohl Opticals Terms And Conditions page located here:
http://www.wohloptics.com/terms.htm#external
External Links to the Site:
All links to the Site must be approved in writing by Wohl Optics, except that Wohl Optics consents to links in which: (i) the link is a text-only link containing only the name “Wohl Optics”; (ii) the link “points” only to www.WohlOptics.com and not to deeper pages;(iii) the link, when activated by a user, displays that page full-screen in a fully operable and navigable browser window and not within a “frame” on the linked website; and (iv) the appearance, position, and other aspects of the link may neither create the false appearance that an entity or its activities or products are associated with or sponsored by Wohl Optics nor be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with the name and trademarks of Wohl Optics or its Affiliates. Wohl Optics reserves the right to revoke this consent to link at any time in its sole discretion.
How in the hell could they possibly enforce this?
What would happen if everyone linked to this post with Wohl Optics as the anchor text =P.
July 17, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Only one way to find out. Lets do it!
July 14, 2008 at 9:21 am
Pretty funny.
July 13, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Srsly lame!
July 13, 2008 at 12:15 pm
The idea is that if you tell people not to do something, they do it more.
I wonder if they try to measure how many weekly emails they get and see what kind of websites want to link to them.
As for enforcing, there is not much they can do, except run a regular “link:” query on google and figure out who links to them without the “permission”.
This may be a move to just tell google “hey, why did you penalize our pagerank? Look at our TOS, they linked to us without permission.”
July 13, 2008 at 11:07 am
this men are crazy, i think:)
July 12, 2008 at 7:38 am
I must be honest and say that I smell a rat here….seems like choice linkbait to me. How did you across this Shoe?
July 12, 2008 at 7:36 am
Make that me three….what kind of a comment was that?
July 12, 2008 at 7:35 am
Why not? I dare you to!
July 11, 2008 at 2:05 am
I smell fish too….could it be the Rand variety….LOL
July 11, 2008 at 2:03 am
Gotta love them lawyers….the world will be such a better place without them and their expensive pieces of paper…hahahaha
July 11, 2008 at 1:55 am
A touch of linkbait here, courtesy of Jeremy. Dunno how effective this strategy will be in the long term though!
July 10, 2008 at 10:46 pm
:LOL:
How do you find this stuff?
July 10, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Thats just hilarious…
July 10, 2008 at 10:38 am
It’s amazing how foolish old school companies are… to think you can enforce this is amazing.
July 10, 2008 at 6:35 am
Haha…
They are funny guys
July 9, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Yes, me too! Weird!
July 9, 2008 at 1:59 pm
July 9, 2008 at 8:53 am
I wish them the best of luck with their absurd TOS.
July 9, 2008 at 7:02 am
July 9, 2008 at 3:50 am
I just wonder what they are going to do with that !
July 9, 2008 at 2:32 am
Hehehe, that’s just hilarious!
July 9, 2008 at 1:40 am
LMAO……OHNO!!! You just broke the TOS!!!!!!
July 9, 2008 at 1:08 am
No, unfortunately they are serious and at least ONE individual has successfuly enforced a ruling against someone linking to the company site (later overturned). It’s most likely a ploy to potentially defend against a competitor.
“Our prices are WAY lower than Whols” is what they don’t want.
Google would be out of business if a judge stops linking.
July 8, 2008 at 11:51 pm
I wonder why they put up such a policy if they know that they can’t enforce it and it is almost illegal. Is it for the publicity?
July 8, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Would SEO matters so much? I had a blog which got most access from google search. But apparantly, most people did not stay for long time for the quality of contents. Since then I started to focus more on providing better contents.
http://www.marketingnavi.com
July 8, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Simply put, they cannot enforce it. Why? Because nothing makes me agree to those terms.
July 8, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Can i put that link in my comment
July 8, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Put a deep link to them on your site and find out. They’ll call you up kicking and screaming and spazing until you take it down. Trust me, I’ve done it. They scream at you until their heads pop off.
July 8, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Don’t link to our deep pages. Of course not, why would they want people to do anything that might help their SEO?
July 8, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Pretty clever on their part. for the record, none of you can link to me either. EVER. I’m telling you, DON’T DO IT!
July 8, 2008 at 11:58 am
Pretty clever on their part. For the record…none of you are allowed to link to me either. EVER. Just DON”T DO IT!
July 8, 2008 at 11:33 am
That’s like saying, You can’t talk about us without you telling us it’s ok.
July 8, 2008 at 10:33 am
i hope you have written permision…
July 8, 2008 at 6:57 am
Haha, that’s hilarious. How can hey enforce that?
July 8, 2008 at 6:29 am
I think it’s a common clause to put in TOSs. I don’t know if they still do, but Neopets’ used to say that you couldn’t link to any of their web pages except the front page. They obviously don’t enforce that though; there are dozens of help websites linking to all sorts of pages.
July 8, 2008 at 4:41 am
You are right, but a little Javascript (or PHP) code on your pages can prevent people from using your content in a frame to. And with better results I guess …
July 8, 2008 at 2:11 am
Something is fishy…
If you goto the opening page of their site, and review the source code there is approx 1/2 dozen links, with the anchor text of “.”, now why would an optical website be linking to any of these sites:
http://www.LongIslandSewer.com
http://www.nassaurubbish.com
http://www.lirubbishremoval.com
Something doesn’t make sense. I’m wondering if either the site had a recent SEO overhaul and the seo company traded in some links or it was hacked by an SEO firm? None of the pages which it links to seem to have any links back to the optical site?
I hate to say it, but I wonder if this is either a paid post by the company or a publicity stunt by Shoemoney Media to promote this site as their client?
Puzzled,
Bradford Knowlton
http://x86v.com
July 7, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Who wouldn’t want link love? Weird.
July 7, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Hah, this page is already number 5 in the rankings.
July 7, 2008 at 9:32 pm
sounds like LOL Optics
July 7, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Thank you, it was new information for me
July 7, 2008 at 6:00 pm
This is the anchor text of a link to a non-existent page at Wohls. Take that!
Hope I didn’t just violate some 404 law that I’m not aware of.
Maybe those jackasses are onto something… I think I’ll either start charging people $10 each to link to me, or maybe just start killing anyone that links to me. I guess it will depend on my mood at the time.
July 7, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Well what ever they have to do I guess. It is a new internet, so get with the times.
July 7, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Great find…that’s funny!
July 7, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Not sure what happened but when I go and check out their site I get a 500 server error, lol.
July 7, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Exactly that Beau, its brilliant.
July 7, 2008 at 4:54 pm
A great way to get bloggers talking about them, and maybe just linking to them “because”. Interesting strategy.
July 7, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Everybody reading this comment is allowed to send me money; however, it must be in cash (large bills only), in a sealed yellow envelope with my first, middle, and last name on it, and delivered to me at home on Tues only between 2:45-3:00 pm.
Paypal, checks, money orders, wire transfers, and credit cards will not be accepted. I appreciate your business.
July 7, 2008 at 3:48 pm
It looks like there server could not handle the load. It is down as of 4:48 pm Eastern.
July 7, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Working in retail, I’ve actually seen a number of companies that require you to agree not to optimize for certain words if you become one of their retailers – and not just trademarked stuff, either. I’ve seen documents that say you can’t use certain phrases on your product page, your meta tags, your Google AdWords…
…but this is easily the most obnoxious search-related policy I’ve ever seen, given that it appears to apply to anyone who happens upon their site.
July 7, 2008 at 3:19 pm
WTF is that?! is the first time when I knew about this, Weird!
July 7, 2008 at 3:05 pm
I guess that means they don’t want to show up Google, Yahoo and MSN if their SERPS don’t appear in compliance with the above.
The search engines oughta take ‘em up on that.
July 7, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Excuse me while I engage in some illegal actions:
Wohl Newsletter
Online Catalog
TOC
LOLZ~!
Can I Use a New Frame?
July 7, 2008 at 2:36 pm
This is bizarre. I’ve never heard of such a thing. How do you find this stuff???
July 7, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Want to see something really funny. Visit their homepage then scroll all the way to the bottom. See those dots?? Run your mouse over them………… hhhhhhhhhh What do you think??
July 7, 2008 at 2:08 pm
The work of a misguided lawyer who charged a large fee for a paragraph that people will laugh at.
July 7, 2008 at 2:07 pm
hahaha. This is great. 1) It’s great that they actually put this garbage in their TOS 2) if this post would outrank them for their own name 3) That shoe is using the idiocy of this company, along with the eagerness for this company to get smoked, to get linsk to his own blog. Brilliant I say!
July 7, 2008 at 2:03 pm
These guys are hilarious. Next they will say that if you don’t pronounce their name correctly, you must quit looking at the site.
July 7, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Seeing as I’m an old, old man (IOW, I’ve been doing this about ten years now) … this used to be very common. Wohl is just being old school about it (or more likely, they haven’t updated their site for years).
I used to run a content portal site for the Time Warner cable franchise in Minneapolis when they first started selling RoadRunner cable modem service. I remember having to go through corporate legal channels sometimes in order to link to certain media sites … and Time Warner owned the damn things in many cases … Time, CNN, Money, etc, etc. And heaven forbid you wanted to “deep link” to anything but the front page.
So yes, this is completely insane … but let me tell ya, you young whippersnappers, back when the Internet was powered by steam and we had to carve html on stone tablets, this is how it was! And we liked it like that!
Kids today, don’t know they’ve been born, tsk tsk … and stay off my lawn, you dang varmints!
July 7, 2008 at 1:51 pm
haha, how cute
July 7, 2008 at 1:36 pm
that is great stuff. i was going quote individual sections and lol them, but i would have to quote the whole thing.
July 7, 2008 at 1:34 pm
They must have had trouble with someone to get all lawyered up. I do not see how they can enforce it though. Links will happen.
July 7, 2008 at 1:32 pm
How clever of them to use reverse psychology! Get everyone to “fight back” by linking, Digging, Stumbling Upon, and blogging their site.
July 7, 2008 at 1:31 pm
lolz
July 7, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Shoe, did you get permission to post that link? It’s not to the home page.
July 7, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Wohl Optics: We Own Hyper Linkings
July 7, 2008 at 1:26 pm
haha, me too
July 7, 2008 at 1:20 pm
wow that’s advanced seo right there. Or just really lame link strategy. Note to self never link to Wohl Opticals.
July 7, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Shoe, I know you got approval in writing before posting that link.
July 7, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Wow, that would make me rebel from linking to them.