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Went Hot: May 31, 2008 - 11:30 pm
Posted By: toddmintz 91 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.audettemedia.com)
Category: Other Search Marketing
20 Comments
Went Hot: May 31, 2008 - 11:30 pm
Posted By: toddmintz 91 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.audettemedia.com)
Category: Other Search Marketing
20 Comments
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Comments
Good stuff from Adam. As an aside, I love the logo!
Thanks Jill!
Great post. Thanks, Adam.
Allow me to summarize:
The Six Principles of Ethical SEO
1- Your client is your charge, and their web presence often has huge import for their business; treat their sites with care and respect.
2- Contributing value to the web environment at large is the first step towards a successful internet marketing campaign.
3- Ethical SEO demands taking an honest assessment of a website and giving the client the cold, hard truth.
4- SEO is not everything. There are myriad aspects to internet marketing that we must employ, from well-structured paid search campaigns to solid link building to content strategies.
5- If your client is paying you to increase their presence online, your role should include educating the client on what works and why.
6- We consider it our duty to not only get our clients great results, but to build in scalable solutions that allow them to continue reaping the rewards (so long as effort is continually applied).
Anybody wish to add another Ethical SEO Principle?
May I add another Ethical SEO Principle ;-)
7- Ethical SEO should be in good standing with the search engines Quality Guidelines.
What does that even mean, Harith?
Jill,
I.e:
Ethical SEO wouldn't violate the search engines Quality Guidelines (example Google Quality Guidelines ) .
Well, Adam may have purposely left that off. I know I wouldn't put it into anything I would write on the subject, but maybe that's just me.
Jill,
Lets take a look at Adam's first principle:
1- Your client is your charge, and their web presence often has huge import for their business; treat their sites with care and respect.
And lets take Google as an example. We know that violating GOOG Quality Guidelines by the SEO may lead to client site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. I wouldn't call that "treat clients sites with care and respect" by the SEO. Don't you agree?
Its therefore of crusial importance for Ethical SEO not to violate the search engines Quality Guidelines!
You're missing my point, which is that if you always do what's right, in general, i.e., don't be deceptive, you don't need to even look at Google's guidelines.
How do you think we all did SEO before they came out with their guidelines? We certainly didn't (and don't) need rules to tell us how to do it, that's for sure!
Jill, that's not entirely true. It's certainly not unheard of for inexperienced webmasters to inadvertently breach the Google guidelines. Oof the most common ways in the UK is to have a duplicate content issue through not redirecting .co.uk to .com (or vice versa).
There's nothing wrong with having both a .com and a .co.uk website. In most cases, I wouldn't recommend redirecting them (regardless of what Google's websmaster guidelines might say...if they even address this issue).
There's nothing wrong with having a .co.uk and .com site if those sites are targeting markets in different countries.
However, it's happened with myself two years ago where web designers were having trouble redirecting the .co.uk version to .com - the result was Google seriously downgrading both sites after a month, most likely because of the duplicate content issue. It's not good practice to let Google index two identical versions of your site as which version should they rank?
Be careful of mixing up cause and effect with things you see happen in SEO. It's highly doubtful that both sites would be effected by such a thing.
It is very likely; and I have seen the effects many times.
Canonicalisation problems can be insidious, not just the usual www and non-www issues, parameter ordering issues, and so on, but stuff like having multiple TLDs etc also come into play in Duplicate Content filtering.
@Harith thanks for the comments. I think it's great you're thinking of new principles to add. On the Webmaster Guidelines addition, I agree with Jill. Abiding by a personal/professional standard makes things like the Google Guidelines sort of obsolete. It's definitely good to be aware of them, and I cite that document regularly. But it's just as Jill says - what did we do before Google? What will we do after Google (as if that'll ever happen!). I feel like the Guidelines are sort of external to a personal ethic.
Thanks for the sphinns everyone!!
hmm this smells a little like "standards"
Adam,
"Abiding by a personal/professional standard makes things like the Google Guidelines sort of obsolete. It's definitely good to be aware of them, and I cite that document regularly. But it's just as Jill says - what did we do before Google?"
SEO industry needs to follow the developements in its field. Today abiding search engines guidelines is the thin line that separates Ethical SEOs from spammers.
And as you know spammers who violate search engines Quality Guidelines would never admit they are spamming. Spammers prefer to be called SEOs.
Even SEOs who publish fake strories to get backlinks in attempt to manupulate Google system would never admit they are spamming GOOG. That what we have witnessed recently :-)
@bogglesmymind - I hope not! The whole purpose of my post was to communicate our own personal/professional standards, I tried to make that clear in the post. Our ethics are nobody else's, and we don't assume them to be.
@Harith good points, got me thinking more about this!
Adam I only meant it in a good way I promise. :)
@bogglesmymind - guess I just showed how worried I was about that issue :) thanks for the comments.