SEO Is Unethical

It's a big no to generalize that SEO is unethical.
In the first place you do SEO to your site for you to reach other people to help and impart knowledge.

 

If building backlinks feeds the family, then so be it. I wouldn't commit murder, steal, or do anything unethical that directly affects someone else in a negative way to feed the family. I hardly can say building backlinks to improve SERPS is unethical. In fact Google says that we should build backlinks, using ethical ways.

 

Using other's blog for your own benifit, is it justice? The owner of the blog have to take care of so many things.. He goes through a lot of spam and all.

 

I never said spam a blog. Post useful comments by all means, but there's nothing wrong with posting a link to your site from the blog. Why do you think there's an area where you can put a link in? Many blogs actually encourage it, and also Follow the links, even with keywords, so as long as your comment is legit.

 

Great point of view i have thought about this before, and can see that google knows how to determine these spam type links so why bother.

 

your right about that but people really want to be success in an online market that is why they do it

 

I think this is why content, and social bookmarknig links are going to be carrying more weight now. It's a lot harder to get 100 Diggs than it is to get 100 regular links.

 

I completely agree. In fact, my first product on SEO was about this very subject.

What a lot of the short-term SEO people don't seem to realise is that the search engines see this as a problem, and they're trying to fix it.

Now, I'm pretty sure someone will find the next hole in the search engine setup and figure out how to exploit it. There will always be a hole. But think about this: what are you going to do while the hole is still closed?

Sure, someone will figure out how to cheat again... but will it be you? Probably not. How long will it take? How many weeks will your sites be buried in the SERPs? How much money will you lose on that?

It's an arms race. Nobody's going to win. It's just going to go on forever, and you'll end up wasting a lot of time that you don't need to waste. Start with quality content, and the rest is tactics - not strategy.

 

I disagree. You can argue that SEO is counterproductive to writing a good article, or at least to writing the best article possible. But helping your article get seen is hardly unethical. It's much less so than many other tactics, like sensationalization, at the very least.

 

@OP Do you have a better way to do it?

SEO is not unethical- it is competition.

 

A better way to make the search engines believe lots of people like your stuff?

Uh, yeah. Have stuff lots of people like.

Seems a lot better than running around saying "I like that stuff!" in different funny voices and hoping you fool people.

 

as long as we not break the rule, not break TOR, it's ethical

 

True that Google is not God, but trying to practice 'ethical' (if there's such a thing) SEO is not about being of service to Google (as God). It's about sparing the people from the agony of receiving spam email, reading spam sites and reading crappy contents, when the real reason why regular people surf is to learn, get informed, and buy with peace of mind.

 

And how do you propose Google (or any search engine) tell what people like and don't? That is exactly what the current system attempts to accomplish. Remember that it is bots who do most of the SERP work as it is very impractical/impossible to have actual humans to do it. Aside from creating AI, there will always be ways to game bots.

 

Hey, sometimes that's fun though

 

There is unethical SEO, then there is ethical SEO. SEO is "search engine optimization". You are merely optimizing your web pages for the search engines, according to what the search engines (TELL YOU) they want, so that you can increase your exposure. Google WANTS you to perform SEO. Read up on Matt Cutts' blog. He offers many tips on optimizing your site for search engines (SEO).

SEO is not unethical unless you are trying to manipulate the search engines using techniques that are against the search engine's terms of service (TOS). End of story.

 

or s/he can have a spam catcher installed.


the bottom line is that the whole reason meta tags were invented was for SEO. search engines have gotten into more organic methods of devising relevancy so as not to be tricked. if Google didn't change its algorithm all the time we'd eventually figure it out and there'd be a helluva lot more spam. since Google's pretty tough to crack, i think we're fine on the spam front.

anyway, SEO isn't going anywhere, may as well get used to it.

 

A webmaster building links is roughly equivalent to a company getting advertising on TV or in the newspaper. They feel that their product is good enough that they prefer customers to come to them before their competitors. That is universally practiced in the business world and is perfectly ethical and businesslike.

 

Well said Sir

Basically be relevant, beat the competition by doing/being so and by proving said relevance and you are on the right track.

Sort of what you we're saying Jim!?!?

 

Um... no. It's more like a company going to a newsstand and scrawling their logo on the side, then writing their name on the front of all the newspapers.

Okay, so it's not quite that bad, but when you get advertising on TV or in the newspaper, you ASK.

An awful lot of backlinking these days is just happening on Web 2.0 sites, where you're allowed to create your own content, and people are skating right up to the edge of what the terms of service will allow.

Getting backlinks in and of itself is great. It's word of mouth. You come to a forum and say "hey, I have this great stuff," and people look at it and say "wow, that is great stuff" and it starts to sound like a Snapple commercial. And if that's the way you do it, FANTASTIC. That's honest and ethical and all those good things.

But when you pretend not to be who you are... when you pretend not to be associated with your own company or product... when you put the link up all by yourself... well, that's just spam. It may not be against the terms of service, but it's against the rules. If you put up a link to your product or service or company, you're supposed to say it's yours.

The FTC is going to be cranking down a bit more on this in the future, I'd expect.