Tag: Website Legal Compliance

Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you are advertising or endorsing?

As the digital realm continues to grow at breakneck speed and rules constantly change, it’s important to stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your web presence is a fundamental factor in your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for material gain, then you will need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the US-based BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)

The new laws affect several business categories, including:

• Any type of advertising, like Google AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creation
• Bloggers
• etc.

If you do not display certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed to enroll in many advertising and affiliate merchant networks.

In addition, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.

In this guide, we discuss the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog.

Does Your Website Comply With The Law?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all laws and regulations wherever you do business.

The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

Consider what would happen to your business if these scenarios were to take place:

• Someone has a heart attack after they use your online fitness program.
• The skin cream you promote as an affiliate gives people skin rashes.
• Your opt-in list displays a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not clearly informed them what you plan to do with it.
• Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog making your site users aware that you are an affiliate for the product you’re marketing that you will receive an affiliate commission if they buy using your affiliate link.
• You did not spell out the terms of your refund/return policies.
• Online visitors claim your testimonials are false and decide to sue you.
• You have not disclosed that you have received a free copy of a product in your review.
• Your site publishes adult-related information and you did not take appropriate measures to keep underage persons from accessing it.

Consider too the following actual examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information to complete a debt reduction offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many internet marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had breached at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were breaking at least 3 of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued with warnings or lose access to the Google program with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk becoming a target of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Product Promoter
• AdSense Publisher
• Product Marketer
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s imperative to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website or blog stays fully compliant with the law.

Complying With 3rd-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.

Compliance with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.

You must let your site visitors know that your business complies will all laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also required in most cases by most companies you do business with online.

Here are just some examples:

Google requires websites to display legal information if using their products. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Making money online with your WordPress sites with Google AdSense display advertising …

(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)

Or promoting your products or services via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell digital products using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you are required to add a number of legal pages to your site before your products are approved for sale in their marketplace …

(Policy requirements product vendors selling via ClickBank)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially if you plan to use testimonials or product endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has already been the case, this typically results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any type of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC regulations and guidelines.

You can find many sites that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. See our additional references and resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Apps

If you are planning to develop social networking applications for your site, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others require you to provide information about various legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote anything online using affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to include on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
• If you have been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)

What Compliance Information Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Covered Against Legal Compliance Issues?

If you suspect that your website falls short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help your business stay out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and third-party service providers, and even help you avoid possible legal issues):

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

As well as the above pages, you may want to consider adding any of the following pages where applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general health or medical content)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Use Of Media (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the right type of disclosure to your website is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – This lets users know that you will not receive any type of payment for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will be compensated if they purchase through affiliate links on your site.
• Review/Sample Copy – Lets users be aware that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Informs users that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs readers that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Compliance Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you will consult lawyers or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once these have been created, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Upload Legal Pages To Your Website

If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.

We recommend creating a legals folder on your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages using FTP)

You can then easily add links to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …

(WordPress Menu)

Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly visible to visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your website) to ensure that users have access to legal information from all pages …

(It’s important to display links to legal information on all of your website’s pages)

For a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer menu, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:

• How To Add Widgets To WordPress

Use Legal Templates

You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and forms and agreements just by searching online, or by visiting sites like the ones shown below:

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

Go here for more details:

• Find Legal Forms

Alternatively, you can purchase a package of cut and paste website legal templates written by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

These templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your web pages.

The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines brought into effect in March 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new page for each legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as previously described.

Go here for more information:

• Scott Talbert’s Legal Page Templates

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

As well as using legal templates, you can keep things really simple using WordPress plugins.

Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven sites you may be interested in using:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WP Legal Pages Plugin)

If the idea of setting up legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing WordPress Legal Pages …

WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you many headaches.

Some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages are:

• Built-in Legal Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the legal pages you need in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like every other page on your site.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. Page unlocks when the user agrees to your legal terms.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will be added to your main dashboard area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)

This lets you view, create and edit your legal pages from the admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, review sites, Amazon sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Type of Site menu)

Choose from a number of pre-configured legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Pre-configured Legal Templates)

Legal page templates include:

• Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
• Linking Policy
• External Links Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Refund Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Agreement
• Facebook Privacy Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• Antispam Policy
• DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
• Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclosure Statement Template
• Medical Disclaimer Template
• Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
• Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
• DMCA Policy Template
• California Privacy Rights Policy Template
• Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
• COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
• Blog Comments Policy Template
• Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclaimer Widget

To learn more this plugin, go here:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Website Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a complete compliance & disclaimer solution for your digital presence …

Learn We’ve written an in-depth review of this plugin here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Social Media Disclosure
• Medical Disclaimer
• Terms of Service
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)

Additionally:

• Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
• Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.

With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.

The plugin developers have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

Visit this website to learn more:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of legal experts to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some type of basic legal protection on your website until you can afford professional legal services.

We want your site to be legally safe!

Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal content, or plugins - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates essential legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you make money online, you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done and the guidelines and terms of service of 3rd-party sites that you may decide to promote or endorse online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.

Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?

Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements pertaining to your business.

Resources

Below is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your website to remain compliant and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – Better Business Bureau
• Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
• Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
• CAN-SPAM Act Guide
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
• FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
• FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
• The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
• FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
• FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

Plus …

• Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• AdSense Help – Required Content
• Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
• Google AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

We hope this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your website.

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