10 Things Website Owners Lie About the Most

1. Traffic – This one is hard to sneak
   past search engines because of tools like Google Analytics. Site owners,
   however, may try to persuade unwitting advertisers or guests that their
   site is more popular than it actually is.  Another common variation
   of this is to use page views instead of unique site visitors to inflate
   your traffic count.  If you want to know how much traffic a site has,
   be sure to be specific about the metric you want (visitors, unique
   visitors, search only traffic, page views, etc.).

2. Sales – In e-commerce, a website
   owner may be tempted to exaggerate his sales in order to stimulate an
   investment or gain more interest in his product or service (or more
   commonly intimidate competitors). For tax purposes, however, a website
   owner might want to do the opposite.

3. Shipping and Handling – Another
   common ploy among some internet retailers is to inflate the S&H fees
   in order to increase per item profit margins. Charging well above the
   postal or shipping rates needed to actually ship the product is just
   outright greed.

4. Security –Allowing their
   certificates to expire, and failing to use adequate encryption and
   security precautions, some websites are simply dishonest about how safe it
   is to visit their site or make purchases there.

5. Source of Content – Plagiarized,
   duplicate, or spun content is rife on the interwebs.  Some website
   owners aren’t even honest about where they get their content from.
   Software is available that will jumble the text of existing content in
   order to get it to pass through Copyscape or other plagiarism checking
   software.

6. The Content Itself – Some website
   owners have even taken to masking the text of their pages by inserting
   keywords throughout the content in a font color that matches the
   background. By doing this their web pages will return in a search for
   those keywords, despite the fact that their website has nothing to do with
   the keyword subject matter.

7. Privacy Policy – While they may
   promise not to sell your personal information to any third parties,
   website owners will collect that and other relevant information to
   establish a buying profile on you. This allows them to customize their
   advertising and website to entice you to spend more.

8. Website Ownership – Some website
   owners, particularly those who operate outside the bounds of honest and
   decent practices, will lie about the site ownership itself. They will use
   dummy corporations and fake or untraceable email addresses in order to
   operate with virtual impunity.

9. Hyperlinks – In order to lure
   visitors to a particular page some website owners will use re-directs and
   false buttons on the browser window. This can be irritating or, even
   worse, a security risk.

10. Typosquatting – Although this can’t
    accurately be regarded as outright lying, it’s a practice that is intended
    to draw traffic to one’s own website when it was attempting to go
    elsewhere. So it’s a more vague form of dishonesty in our book. Website
    owners will buy up common misspellings of popular domains so that when
    someone does misspell, that surfer is led to the owner’s site instead of
    the one they had intended to type.

Contacts and sources:
Hannah Howard
http://www.longhornleads.com/blog/2012/10-things-website-owners-lie-about-the-most/