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We are a web promotion company in korea
Recently yahoo Korea has announced that it is considered illegal to guarantee top ranking in Yahoo.
Does this make sense?
I've never heard of Yahoo doing this before. How did they notify you of this?
Any body else have experience with this?
I don't know specifically about Korea, but I think that most countries have contract laws that are more or less similar to what I am familiar with from Germany. This legislation says that a clause in a contract between two parties is invalid, if its outcome depends on the actions of a third party that has not also signed the same contract.
In your case, your SEO contract purports that you can garantee placement on Yahoos site, while in reality the contractually uninvolved third party Yahoo is the only entity that has full control over that placement. You are therefore promising something to your clients that you have no power to deliver, other than by chance.
Based on the same principle, a client might also be tempted to establish a case of false advertizing if you should happen to miss your target.
Did Yahoo offer any explanation of their own?
Of course, just them saying so doesn't necessarily make it illegal, but chances are they do have a point. The other interesting question is, even in the case that your garantee was illegal as a contractual clause between you and your customers, whether Yahoo has any legal way to hassle you about it (other than by simply dropping your listings).
In general the only SEO's who guarantee placement and rankings are the scammers who build cookie-cutter pages and give you top ranking for non-competitive keywords that nobody searches on.
