The SEM/SEO industry seems to spend a lot of time taking abuse or having to defend itself from criticism of late. Even though even the blackest of hats do not technically break any laws (unless Google has finally filed to become an independent state) these activities get attributed to the industry as a whole and then painted with a corruption/criminal brush quite often.
So when someone posed to me recently that our industry should take a look in the mirror at why this is and try to understand other people’s criticism, my first reaction was indignation. Screw those people and their misguided opinions, I thought. If they can’t separate spamming from helping sites get properly indexed then that’s their own ignorance. But the more I think about it, the more I guess every industry has to play the game of PR and reputation management. It’s almost like we are so hard at work doing that for clients and companies, that we have neglected to do that for ourselves as effectively as we could. Sure, we scream at Calacanis and Scoble when they spout nonsense, but what do we do to make it so when we tell a lay person what we do that they don’t cringe or actually comprehend what it even is? I know we have organizations like SEMPO, but does anybody outside our industry even know who that is?
Well, to get to my point of discussion, being far from the mindset that we should have some sort of "code of conduct" or stupid badges of compliance, I at least think we should have open discussion about what is SEM/SEO ethics. How do we draw those lines of white hat, black hat (or Panama Jack hat in my case)? Say you were going to train the next generation of SEOs and SEMs, and they had a course on ethics, like many degree programs do. After a decade or so of this industry, what have we learned that we can impart as to what is ethical and what is not?
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So when someone posed to me recently that our industry should take a look in the mirror at why this is and try to understand other people’s criticism, my first reaction was indignation. Screw those people and their misguided opinions, I thought. If they can’t separate spamming from helping sites get properly indexed then that’s their own ignorance. But the more I think about it, the more I guess every industry has to play the game of PR and reputation management. It’s almost like we are so hard at work doing that for clients and companies, that we have neglected to do that for ourselves as effectively as we could. Sure, we scream at Calacanis and Scoble when they spout nonsense, but what do we do to make it so when we tell a lay person what we do that they don’t cringe or actually comprehend what it even is? I know we have organizations like SEMPO, but does anybody outside our industry even know who that is?
Well, to get to my point of discussion, being far from the mindset that we should have some sort of "code of conduct" or stupid badges of compliance, I at least think we should have open discussion about what is SEM/SEO ethics. How do we draw those lines of white hat, black hat (or Panama Jack hat in my case)? Say you were going to train the next generation of SEOs and SEMs, and they had a course on ethics, like many degree programs do. After a decade or so of this industry, what have we learned that we can impart as to what is ethical and what is not?
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Here’s a specific ethics question for conversation: I created what some might call a dynamic landing page generator once. It took a list of a client’s products and a list of all the states they served with this product. It then created a page for every product/state combo and a master list for crawling. I made sure to have the copy intelligible to the visitors and the database served up product info as well as related accompanying products and the information regarding shipping and implementation of that product in each region. The purpose was to go after long tail search phrases with a regional vertical. It was highly successful, it added tons of pages to the index but conversion rates from these pages were in the 35% range overall, as it provided an exact answer to their product + location based long tail queries. Some would call that spamming, but is it unethical to mass create pages if the goal is to go after the long tail and better unite potential customers with what they are looking for?
Attempts at working out some consensus about ethics in search marketing have failed a number of times in the past. There are always going to be some who state that certain practices are unethical, others who say that nothing you do for the benefit of the client is unethical as long as you’re honest about the level of risk involved, and a whole lot of people somewhere in between.
I don’t work in the SEO/SEM industry. So I have to ask: What exactly could possibly be unethical about these mass landing pages? Too much work for the Googlebot and other crawlers? Or just "Other people who don’t understand how the web works might not have thought to do it?" I’m totally serious asking this: What real, honest to goodness ethical principle could this violate?
I also think it might make sense to decouple ethics from Google’s guidelines. With the autogenerated landing page issue, for instance, those are against Google’s guidelines not necessarily because they’re unethical, but rather, from a search engine’s perspective, one of their goals is to serve up a diverse set of results, and returning multiple versions of that landing page wouldn’t meet that goal. If the pages are useful to users, and they convert well, then they may be the way to go. Of course, in that case, you might also look to see if you can create a page that both is useful to users and is a good fit to be returned in results, if you care about both of those things. If you are creating the page just to dominate the results, then I suppose a case could be made that you’re trying to cheat a company and that might be unethical. But lots of the guidelines are more reverse engineering of the types of SERPs the engines want to return, rather than ethical guideposts. If a large portion of your marketing strategy is to rank highly in the SERPs, then you might follow the guidelines so that you meet the criteria that search engines use for displaying the most relevant useful results they can to users. If that isn’t your main strategy, then those aren’t the guidelines you need to worry about most. (You might care more about design or usability guidelines, for instance.) I feel like the conversation is always about how you’re bad or evil or unethical if you don’t follow the guidelines, when actually, you’re just at risk for not meeting the criteria for being listed. If you don’t follow usability guidelines, you might be seen as designing hard to use sites, but you likely wouldn’t be called unethical. Ethics, I think, come in when you are trying to deceive search engines and/or users. If you are looking to see where to draw lines, that might be a good place to start.
Although I am not an SEO I believe that ethics is fairly simple to define: if it serves the greater good and does not cause damage to nor compete unfairly with others, it is ethical. If it intentionally damages others, does not serve the greater good, competes unfairly, it is unethical. If your focus is on what others are doing instead of what your goals are, the intent or action you are considering may also be unethical. To apply those concepts to SEO examples: Creating specific landing pages - whether manually or dynamically - so that someone seeking your services in a specific geographic area can find you benefits the searcher, benefits the client, and does not damage the competition; therefore, I believe it is ethical. Intentionally trying to dominate the listings is bad for the searcher and your competitors so that is unethical. If it results from the search engine’s algorithm rather than intentional behavior, then the algorithm should be improved instead of imposing artificial rules about legitimate SEO practices. The black hat PPC tactics mentioned in a recent article are clearly unethical because their intent is either to damage someone else or to compete unfairly. The risk of getting caught has nothing to do whether something is ethical. The end never justifies the means. Clearly our collective societal, ethical compass is in need of adjustment. Some even argue that ethics do not apply to corporations - which is clear by their behavior and our tolerance of it; however, this is a position I find untenable and expect to change in the future. As Vanessa so wisely points out, ethics and guidelines are two different things. Guidelines are man-made rules that may or may not have anything to do with ethical behavior; ethics could be argued to be laws of nature which are universally true and applicable regardless of cultural or religious dogma. When individual responsibility becomes the norm, the world will be a very different place indeed.
SEO ethics is not very complicated. It can be summed up in two words: *Help humans* If you make web pages and web sites that are helpful to humans in content, context and usability it’s OK. People who make search engines try to make technology that also helps humans based on how they believe humans think. So (m)any attempt(s) to make web pages that only relate to how machines think will generally generate noise in the search engines and and confusion in the web site and thus not help humans.
Very interesting takes, good discussion. I like Vanessa’s comment: "Ethics, I think, come in when you are trying to deceive search engines and/or users." Consider this is light of "cloaking" which I can see could have positive purposes, though could technically be "deceiving" the engines. If you content is customized based on user IP, or say you serve up a simplified "Design-less" page to the Google IPs to better facilitate crawling (not keyword stuffed mind you), does the intent outweigh the approach? I also like what FlyingRose had to say: "...if it serves the greater good and does not cause damage to nor compete unfairly with others, it is ethical." While I could agree that damaging others is a clear cut unethical move, in any industry, not so sure I buy the "compete unfairly", at least not without major qualification of that statement. Competition is by nature an uneven battle, otherwise it would be called "sharing". Some people are going to have advantages over others, a major part of marketing is assessing your brand’s strengths and leveraging them to best your competitors. There’s no such thing as a level playing field, especially when it comes to internet marketing.
There is such a thing as unfair competition. One of the articles on Sphinn earlier this week described a bloggers bad experience with hacking. Some had hacked in and substituted a version of a web page that only showed to Google, leaveing the normal version up for everyone else. As a result, that blogger lost Google rank. That sort of thing would be unfair. It’s also not at all a normal practice for SEO’s. The problem for SEO’s is that some people have the notion that any attempt to rank well with search engines is wrong. This is clearly silly. Writing well organized pages, with good site maps, good internal linking, precise use of terms etc. is not at all unethical. Publicizing your site is not unethical. Mentioning each and every blog post on Twitter is not unethical. Providing good, useful free content to attract links is not unethical. I’m not an SEO, but most the advice I read consists of the types of things I read above. Heck, if those are unetichal, then we’d find the following unethical in the real world: moping floors, cleaning counters and making sure your grocery store smells nice. Or funding a local little leage team with your grocery stores name. Listing your phone number in the yellow pages. Or pretty much any other good business practices other than just stocking your store, hanging out a shingle and waiting for people to stop by. No doubt there are unethical grocers and unethical SEO’s. But that doesn’t make either business unethical.
Well said.
I think the thing with the whole SEOs are unethical is too big for any one consultant or firm to handle. The SERPs are littered with lousy, unethical companies offering SEO services. There really isn’t a way to fight back against that, as far as I can see, on a large scale. What you can do is deal with the individual business owners who come to you saying, "Well, this other guy told me he’d submit me to 1000 search engines. Won’t you do that?" At that point, you do your best to educate the client, and if they trust you, they learn the difference between what you do and what a scammer does. If they don’t trust you and walk away in confusion, it’s a lost opportunity, but probably not one to fret over too much. The next client that comes along will trust you. So, what I’m saying, I guess, is that we have to deal with this on a client by client basis, and pity the folks who get sucked in by the scammers. As Jill points out, even Scoble doesn’t know what the deal is. My feeling is that he should hire a good SEO to explain to him why what legitimate consultants do is valuable, ethical and important. Maybe Robert Scoble has simply never worked with a good SEO. Miriam
I believe quality bloggers will have an enormous positive impact on the credibility and perception of SEM. Just as many industries have writers who focus on public relations, consistently writing about the positive aspects of what we do - and what others in our industry do - will improve the collective image. Those who figure out the power of interconnected networks of blogs will have a far more visible influence than many can currently envision.
Think you hit the nail on the head Jill. Unfortunately it only takes a couple of bad stories to undo a couple of years of hard work, and really its in our own interests to try and portray our industry in the best light we can. White hat/Black hat make sense from an implementation perspective, however clients look far wider than that, and unfortunately there are some (in my opinion too many) clients (probably more so in the SME market) that have had bad experiences from SEM agencies as regards their SEO services - whether it be in terms of not managing expectations, or bad management of the site in terms of SEO. This I would suggest lies out of the remit of the ’hat discussion’ and more in line with business - however as an industry where pretty much anyone can do it - we have no real control over standards or quality of work. However I will counter my above argument - with the fact that web design industry is much the same in terms of structure - however they do not seem to have the same problems regarding reputation as we do. Maybe theres a place to start. I again would suggest as Jill has said, it is a case of educating the wider public of search marketing, and show it is not merely a case of Search engine spam, and indeed a valuable, vital and technical part of the marketing mix
Definitely agree, education is key. A lot of companies do understand this, and as a result of hiring good firms or bringing the effort in house, the reap the benefits of a well executed online marketing strategy that covers the bases. There are far too many other business owners who enter the market not understanding that you have to earn the traffic, it is not at all like that FedEx commercial where you "push the button" and you have a million orders. For those guys it’s a disservice to have the media and others telling them SEO is a scam on the whole when the key to their business success lies in employing proper SEO tactics to reach their audiences. Social networks and directories just aint going to do that for them, ever.