Completed adidas King of the Road? Congratulations! Looking for the race results? Well, it’s going to be available soon! So why does this post exist in the first place? This is my attempt at educating some runners as well as protest about some bad practices I’m seeing online.

Lately I’ve been noticing some “immoral” sites proliferating on the internet corrupting search engine results with false race results. There we are, excited to see our official race results after our race, and after looking for it via our favorite engines we’d be lead to believe that these sites already have the results we sought after–only to find out it’s just a placeholder! Infuriating! Irresponsible! Yes, some sites do that, they can do that, but should they?

These sites care nothing about their readers, they’re just in it for hits. Each time we visit their sites we support their “evil” deeds by making them look popular. Some companies foolishly fall to their traps and support these rubbish sites without realizing that endorsing these sites actually tarnish their brands. I wouldn’t support a site that sees its visitors as mere “hits.”

I apologize to adidas and King of the Road for being dragged into this hullabaloo, but I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity for me as a blogger to help educate the online community. As online users, we should all be aware of credible sites and stay away from in-credible ones. It’s like staying away from malware sites–it’s for your own safety! Each time we visit their site we support what they do, like a vote of confidence, like a tap on the shoulder. They fooled us once, don’t be fooled over and over again! Sure we want our race results, and we want it now, but quality takes time, so for accurate results let us all wait for the official race results coming from the race organizers themselves and not be mislead to these questionable sites.

To online advertisers, hits aren’t everything! It does not define the quality of the site, nor the character of the people behind it. Would you put up your posters in front of a garbage heap? That’s what you’re doing when you place your ads onto these dumpsites, I mean websites.

And to my fellow bloggers, I believe that we have a responsibility to promote good conducts online. It includes allegiance with the truth and practicing what we believe is right and fair. It’s not always about the hits.

Good manners and right conduct never go out of style, and a little common sense goes quite far. Why would a third-party site have race results while the event website has not? Would you buy an LV bag in the sidewalk and expect it to be authentic?

We all live in the real world, not in the cyber world, so let’s keep it real and live well. What we do online reflects how we are offline. Let us be the change we want to be, and not the problems we love to hate.

* * *