Everyone has something to say and some people just don’t think far enough ahead before saying things on the Internet some times. I am sure we have all read or possibly even said something at one point or another that we wish could be erased but there it sits, cached in Google forever just staring you back in the face, taunting you.

Hopefully if this has happened to you it’s not something terrible or something that could hurt your business. Everyone has opinions about things, they definitely don’t need a website or business owner agreeing with them or even giving them more ammunition if they are already fishing for “dirt”. I was researching a bit today for some upcoming articles I plan on writing that are totally unrelated to this and came across one particular instance of what I like to call “think before you type idiot” syndrome, and I’m going to share it here with you in the hopes that it will prevent others from making the same mistake as this individual made.

If your business is online and based upon a need that your customers have which requires some level of expertise from you on a certain topic, do you think saying that anyone could do what you do with no knowledge of your business, industry or products would be a wise statement? I don’t think it would be, especially when anyone who searched for your site could easily find the results of what you said about it.

Here is the scenario as it played out in this particular instance, a website owner that offers “professional domain appraisals” puts his site up for sale on eBay, in his eBay auction he makes a statement of “See an example of an appriasal (yes the typo is in the ad) you would do” then further down in the auction text it states “There is no need to have any knowledge of the domain name business to be able to own this site. You decide what to charge for each sale” and so on and so forth. Basically saying hey, we make a claim right on our website to offer a professional service and have a bullet point that says “Each domain appraisal is personally researched by 2 domain name appraisers”right on our home page. Well guess what, that statement is a bunch of crap, it’s actually done by a script that anyone could operate and this site owner just said that right out in the open for the entire world to read, oops.

I don’t know about you but I’m not a big fan of automated domain appraisals and I have yet to see one appraise any of my domains accurately but that’s another post all together, the point of this is to hopefully encourage people to think before typing or talking. There is not much worse than making yourself out to be a liar, a mistake like this one can have pretty dramatic implications for your business as well.

Moral of the story, think before you speak (or type)