SEO Consult Blog

Ethical SEO Explained

Ethical SEO applies to techniques and not individual SEO practitioners so it is important to make a distinction between the two. SEO practitioners may think they are behaving ethically toward their clients, but this does not mean their practices are ethical, or that they are in the best interest of anyone besides themselves.

Deciding Which Hat to Wear

Search engines have one static goal, and that is to give users relevant, information on the subject they are searching for. If you can provide this, you will be at the top for a long, long time.  So depending on which angel on your shoulder you are listening to will decide which hat you don, White hat or a Black Hat.

Generally White Hat refers to techniques that are ethical and increase the overall quality of your page or site, giving you guaranteed long-term results. But, if you decide on a Black Hat you will be employing techniques that devised purely to trick search engines into ranking your website higher, the downside of this is that search engines develop algorithms to detect these techniques and if caught out will not only devalue these techniques, but have your site banned from the search engine results.

Roles and Responsibilities

In order to implement and maintain the Angel of ethical SEO, stakeholders such as Searchers, Search Engines and Site Owners have responsibilities.  The Web as a whole is also involved as search engines are an important part of the information architecture of the Web, it has something to lose if unethical techniques are used that result in a failure to improve quality and diversity of search results for Searchers.

Searchers have their own roles and responsibilities in ethical Search Engine Optimiser and means using those search modifiers and tools available in order to tailor their search results to their exact requirements as well as having a basic awareness of technical issues and be able to recognise clearly labelled advertising within their search results.  They also have to obey the terms of service of the search engines they use and the sites they visit.

Search Engines must present web sites fairly in search results and as well as obeying robot standards.  They need to crawl and index the web without placing undue strain on it and they need to determine the relevance of resources to queries made by searchers and provide good quality, trustworthy results with clearly labelled advertising or they run the risk of losing their trust.

Site owners must obey the terms of service of the search engine they are submitted to while ensuring their actions do the most good and the least harm by not deceiving the search engine in order to gain unwarranted placements. They must provide good quality web sites designed to appeal to their target market and they need to correct any problems pertaining to architecture, accessibility and usability.  They must make good use of robot standards and they should market their site using links which are designed so that people can see and follow them.

Tags: Ethical Search Engine Optimisation, seo, web, website optimisation