SEO comprises all activities involved in increasing a website’s exposure in the search engines. It involves many different strategies which, in essence, manipulate search results. Week after week, I read a slew of SEO bloggers who write about practicing ‘ethical’ SEO techniques. They preach about what is and isn’t ethical when it comes to search engine optimization. Some talk about the evils of practices like link renting and social bookmarking. Others frown upon practices such as keyword stuffing, and blog/forum spamming. What all these bloggers have in common is that they believe their own bullshit.
Why SEO May Be Fundamentally Unethical
As SEOs, we know that links are one of the most powerful forces in determining search engine rankings. Search engines value links because people will naturally link to the best content. In all honesty, most link building techniques involve unnaturally building links to a website. That is, they focus on creating and encouraging others (who wouldn’t have otherwise linked) to link to a website. Would it be fair to say that link building, fundamentally, is an unethical practice?
Content creation and link baiting seem to be the only link building strategies for naturally, and ethically, building links. By creating great content, others are more likely to link to you. Directory submission, link requests/exchanges, article marketing, etc. are all strategies of unnaturally building links to a website. Many of us spend hours ‘encouraging’ other sites to pass links to us, which is about as unnatural as it gets.
Re-defining Ethical SEO
SEO, as its core, isn’t a particularly ethical process. To begin with, the nice people at Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have created fantastic tools useful for finding information on the internet. As SEOs we seek to inhibit the search engines’ ability to naturally provide results.
We rewrite copy, build links, cleanup code and much more to move our clients to the top of search results pages. While many SEOs won’t say it, we essentially ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking that our clients offer the best information for targeted sets of keyword searches.
In my humble opinion, ethical SEO simply means that your client understands the level of risks being taken to achieve desired goals. The responsibility of any SEO is to make clients aware of the risks, if any, that different SEO strategies will have on their business. Really, this relationship is similar to the relationship between a stock broker and an investor.
No matter what their goals, each client should be made aware of risks, if any, that may be taken to achieve results. Sometimes the risks are fairly small or non-existent. Other clients seek more aggressive link-building techniques that can without doubt cause problems in the long run.
Maybe it’s time for SEOs to get off the soap box with regards to ethics and best practices. Honesty with clients is the only ethic worth talking about. Drawing a fine line between honest and dishonest SEO practices isn’t worth the time or effort and is easily debated.
