Ethical search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are crucial when planning an SEO campaign, or when generally maintaining the SEO of your website.
It’s referred to quite simply as a ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat’ approach to Search Engine Optimization – though there’s often ‘grey areas’ between the two. Most often ‘white hat’ relates to SEO methods that are inline with search engine guidelines and follow the SEO accepted code of conduct. ‘Black hat’ relates to Search Engine Optimization methods developed solely to manipulate search engines into giving your website high page rankings. Search engines’ punishment for ‘black hat’ SEO methods can be the banning of your website from their result lists. Therefore it’s vital you have a broad understanding of ethical Search Engine Optimization.
What’s unethical?
Keyword stuffing
The use of keywords is one of the most common SEO techniques, but excessively flooding your website content with keywords – or even hiding them in the website’s code – makes the content irrelevant to online users. The editorial content should still be engaging and relevant to users while still retaining SEO Keywords.
Unrelated keywords
This is the use of keywords that are not directly linked to the product or service on the website. For example, a website selling luxury holiday packages that lists the names of celebrities without providing such information. This lures the traffic that’s looking for celebrities to the website – without providing the relevant information being searched for by the user.
Page cloaking
This is a slightly more technical form of Unethical SEO but it’s a technical method where different webpages are created to be delivered under different conditions. The pages are designed for search engines and humans – the ones for search engines have been optimised, and the ones for humans have not. The optimised pages are generally not aesthetically appealing as the ones created for humans. This prevents search engines from grading the actual pages seen by a human – which reduces the ability to provide relevant search results to the online user.
Mirror websites
This is often a sincere accidental error when building up Search Engine Optimization for a website. When information is gathered by search engines all identical data is considered ‘duplicate’. Sites with large amounts of duplicate content may be treated as spam by search engines and could be removed from their search indexes.
Intentional spelling mistakes
This occurs when popular names are often purposefully misspelled, for example ‘airfairs’ instead of ‘airfares’.
Code swapping
This is generally a short term benefit – before the search engine identifies the change. Code swapping is when an established top ranking web page is changed to another page that is irrelevant to the search.
Scraper sites (or data blogs with no distinctive content)
Importing content from one site to another is now very simple, this is called RSS – or ‘really simple syndication’. Blogs can be used this way and the content can be duplicated across hundreds of websites – with the original content only slightly altered. This is boosted by Google’s AdWords, which is a business strategy aimed at using content to build web pages to intentionally attract ad-clicks.
Related posts:
- Start Winning with Search Engine Optimisation
- Don’t get the black tag of ‘Search Engine Spammer’
- How To Create The Right Environment With Your SEO Consultant
- The Difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO
- Creating A Search Engine Friendly Website
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Great to know that attention is still there on how to make and implement search engine optimization and that is through ethical SEO campaigns. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this matter.
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Great stuff !
[...] Usually when you hear an SEO talk about web ethics, you think of white hat and black hat SEO. I’m sure most of you are familiar with these terms. White hat refers professional clean SEO that uses only techniques that are approved by the Search Engines and the SEO community in general. Black hat SEO refers to some of the shadier techniques that, while they may have a short term benefit, are actually dangerous in the long term. More importantly, they are misleading and wrong. Go here if you want to learn more about Black Hat SEO. [...]