Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose services or products you are using or recommending?
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes products and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.
New laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The new laws affect several online business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products on their network, PayPal may close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will reject your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to participate in various advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
If your business online is not in compliance, you could end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your website may be required to comply with legal requirements, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of other providers whose products or services you may be advertising online, and that there are solutions that can help your site become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice about your website or business. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important
Are you at risk? Consider for a minute what could happen to your business if these scenarios were to happen:
- Someone has a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate gives a number of users allergic reactions.
- You’ve informed your subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not spelled out exactly what you’ll do with their details.
- Someone steals content from your website and puts it up on their website.
- There is no statement on your website or blog making visitors aware that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and could receive a sales commission if visitors buy the product using your link.
- You did not spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
- Your visitors claim your testimonials are all fake and try to sue you because of it.
- You didn’t disclose that you received a free copy in your product review.
- Your website publishes adult information and you haven’t taken sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.
Consider now these actual case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up personal information to complete his offer. In addition to a substantial $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to provide everyone they do business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer received 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 information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of at least three 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 notices or lose access to the Google program whose policies they had infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to risk being a target of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords User
- Product Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
it’s important to make sure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and information displayed to all site users.
Complying With 3rd-Party Services
Big companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need and importance of complying with the terms and policies of third-party service providers.
You must let your visitors know that your business complies will all legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required in many cases by most companies you will do business with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information if using their services. This includes Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Generating revenue online with your online properties using Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)
Or promoting your services through Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell products online via companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you are required to add a number of legal pages before your products are approved for sale in their network …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially if you plan to sell products and services using testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many business are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. you should protect your business by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
Many business resources provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Applications - Don’t Forget These
If you plan to create applications that will integrate with your site, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with information about your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything online using affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or use Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
What Compliance Information Pages Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Legally Compliant?
If your website is falling short in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your website should help your site keep out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and third-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Page
- Privacy Statement
- Terms & Conditions
- Website Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to consider adding one or more of the following pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general financial information)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Audio/Video Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to download media on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right web content disclosure information is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – This lets users be aware that you are not receiving any kind of compensation for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your readers be aware that you will benefit financially if they purchase through affiliate links on your site.
- Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs visitors that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Informs users that you were compensated in some way to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets readers know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Website
Ideally, you should consult a lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this completed, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually
If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legal directory in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. via FTP) …
(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)
You can then easily add links to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
Displaying Legal Pages On Your Website
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website) so that visitors have access to the information from all pages …
(Display links to legal information to visitors on all of your website’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu here:
Ready-Made Legal Templates
You can find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or going to websites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms)
More info:
Alternatively, you can download a set of legal templates written by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Website Legal Pages)
These templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal web pages.
The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google, DART, etc.
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.
You can either create a new page on your website for each legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload these to your server as previously described.
Go here for more information:
Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins
As well as using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use plugins.
Here are some great plugins for WordPress-powered websites and blogs worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal pages manually, then consider choosing WordPress Legal Pages …
This plugin is not free, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your website a lot easier and save you loads of headaches.
Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes – 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 check box and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. Page unlocks only when users agree to your terms.
- New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will display inside your dashboard menu …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)
The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate/review sites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages – Page Type)
Choose from a number of pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – 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 useful plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-driven websites containing over twenty customizable legal templates for your site …
Go here to learn more:
Legal Suite Pro
(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 And Conditions
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin 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 powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites.
Go here for more details:
If using the services of a lawyer to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire the services of a legal firm.
We want your website to be legally protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal content, or a WordPress legal pages plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator allows you to quickly generate basic 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 do business online, you need to ensure that your website complies with government laws and regulations and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or recommending online. Your website must comply with various laws and regulatory guidelines, many of which you may not be aware of.
Non-compliance 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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law pertaining to your business.
References And Resources
Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your site to comply and meet its legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
- 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
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- United States Copyright Office
And …
- 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your website.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)