I’ve come across a few things lately which have prompted me to think about this question. Once upon a time, it was fairly simple, there was White Hat SEO and there was Black Hat SEO. White Hats didn’t do anything that broke the search engines’ guidelines, and Black Hats did.
Over time, customer awareness has grown, particularly with some high profile bans from the search engines, and so companies have become more careful about whom they choose.
Successful black hat SEO tends to mean having a lot of different domains on the boil, so that when one gets banned, you just switch to another. This isn’t a good tactic for companies trying to build a brand, so many black hats work for themselves, so they are risking their own profits and sites, not someone else’s. No customers means no recriminations.
The term ‘ethical’ as far as I can tell, came about as a way to describe the black hat, white hat difference to potential clients. It’s an easy to understand term and describes the difference quite accurately.
However, as time has gone on, the search engines’ guidelines have become more and more broad about what they do and don’t like SEOs to do.
So it has changed over time – for instance companies that call themselves ethical do things like buy links. Many use automated rank checkers.
And ‘ethical’ companies undertake unethical practices (in the original meaning of the word) like the three way linking scam. Or is that just a confusion of moral and ethical?
Should ethical mean you report spam in Google’s index? Or report link buying via Google Webmaster Tools? A debate in itself, but it seems that the majority don’t do so.
Should ethical mean telling a client when you do something that is against search engine guidelines? Danny Sullivan has also had a rant about people buying links not disclosing the risks to the host sites.
I’ve also come across “link building” services that promise “high quality, inbound, one-way anchor text links”, that when examined turn out to be automated splogs, despite promising that these links will be on mature websites with high page rank.
Some of these linkbuilding/SEO companies have their own site excluded (deliberately) from the search engines. What message does that give out?
It has to be said that almost all SEO is about “manipulating” the results to a better result for the client. Technically search engines could say it is artificial and therefore all unethical as far as they are concerned.
So the definition of ethical search engine optimisation is being stretched in all directions. It is incredibly hard for a potential client to differentiate SEO services when everyone is using the same language.
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