SEO Contract Ripoffs - Avoid Losing Your Website
How to protect your website when you cancel an SEO or web services contract.
SEO Tip: Even the lowly hyperlink may be copyright protected by law.
Do you own copyrights to your metadata and other creations?
If the answer is no, you need an Exit Strategy BEFORE you cancel your service agreement.
There are SEO / SEM companies in the industry catering to lawyers that retain copyrights to any works that they create for you.
Depending upon the company, that can mean they may own your flash, images, certain content, hyperlinks, and even metadata.
Under the terms of these agreements if you cancel your services your website can be stripped of page titles, metadata, applications, content, and anything else the company claims they "created" for you.
Although this is not very nice, it can also be very legal, and it will destroy your website.
Work for hire agreement laws may not protect your copyrights
Be advised that under California law, work-for-hire agreements automatically assign all copyrights for creations to the person who did the work - not the company who hired them.
How To Protect Your Website When You Cancel a Web Services Contract
Website rebuilds
Why you need an exit strategy before you cancel your web services contact
If you have a current contract with a web service provider that permits them to strip metadata, applications, site features, content, hyperlinks, images - or any other "creation" from your website if you leave, contact us for specific advice before you cancel your contract. If you don't, you could end up with a dead website. >>Hourly Consulting Services
Backup Your Website
Before you cancel services with any company, it is absolutely imperative that you completely back up your entire website and all its files before terminating the agreement. Make sure the copy is on a CD, your hard drive, or another server that is not under the control of your current company. If you do not have an IT person in house, copy every single file you can - even if you do not know what it is.
It is important to understand that there are certain things you may not be able to use. If your contract states that any "creations" made by your current company belong to them, they do. Just because you may be able to copy these files does not mean you can legally use them again. Bugt at least you will have the files you need to sort out the legal stuff later.
If you already canceled your contract and your website was not returned to you in working order, we can rebuild your site for you. And, if you contact us immediately, we might even be able to still grab your old site.>>Website rebuilding services
You Might not get a Working Website Back
Unfortunately, companies who use proprietary content management software and "widget" type applications may hand you an HTML version of your site that will not work on its own. They should have told you this when you signed a contract - but then you might not have sign one.
For example, "Search Site" features, automatic updates of pages, calendars, and other functions like "email this page," print page, bookmark, and even contact forms may no longer work in an HTML environment.
Another problem when you move websites from one platform to another is that the page URLs can change. For example, if your URL extensions now are .asp or are "event" driven (you know, the URLs with a ? and lots of weird stuff like "id") and it is handed back to you with .html extensions, you have a really big mess on your hands. Not only will all your old URLs not work, they will deliver 404 (page not found) errors to search engine robots and to anyone who bookmarked your old site URLs. Then you have an "OMG my website is dead - someone lay hands on it!" situation.
You Do Not Always Get What You Paid For
You paid a lot of money for your website so you probably think you are entitled to have a working website turned over to you but the fine print of some web service contracts contains some loophole that allows disreputable web services companies to give you back a non-working version of your website. Of course, you can stay with their company and keep your website.