New Court Case Sets Precedent for Web Support Companies

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, it was reported that a Utah-based web design and hosting company has been ordered to pay almost $800,000 to Cleveland Golf Co. for knowingly building and promoting a website that sold counterfeit Cleveland golf clubs.

According to the article, this case marks the first time that a website design company has been held liable for such a practice. The design firm was ordered to pay over 27 times more in damages to Cleveland than was the company that actually imported and sold the fake clubs.

This adds an interesting new twist to the “white hat, black hat” SEO saga. The web design company in question built the site using SEO strategies designed to lead shoppers looking for genuine Cleveland golf clubs to the copycat clubs’ site, which was called, by wacky coincidence, copycatclubs.com.

So, if you look at it from a certain angle, the website support company was pretty much just doing their job, building the best possible site for the company that hired them. But, since the company that hired them was engaged in business practices that were sketchy from the start, does this turn the web designers’ practices into black-hat SEO? Or is it just a case of doing white hat work for a black hat business?

Given that the website was called copycatclubs.com, it seems like the website design firm should have known that something foul was afoot. But, then again, they were paid to do a job, which they did—maybe a little too well. It’s sort of a fine line: every company wants to do their best work for every client, but, if a client may be up to something shady, where does responsibility for that shadiness begin/end?

Now we know that at least part of the responsibility (up to 2700%, in some cases) does lie with the web developers. Read the whole story here.

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