If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought.
As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society.
edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not.
Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll remember, has (some) constitutional protections within the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It seems as if this would just drive the worst of it overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer, maybe he has something more clever than I can come up with on a Friday at 5pm.
