SEO Is Unethical

The "nofollow" link isn't worthless, it just doesn't pass page rank... and one of the things the search engines are doing is basically downgrading all the links to "nofollow" anyway. There just aren't enough people using it properly.

The "nofollow" attribute on a link is supposed to say "this is not an endorsement." But people have mucked it up, and a lot of them thought "nofollow" meant "don't spider this link" - like a robots.txt "Disallow" - or "this link leads offsite." A lot of others have said "well, I don't want MY page rank passed to ANYTHING" and just made every link they posted "nofollow."

So essentially, "nofollow" isn't really understood, and it's been misused so much that the search engines basically have to ignore it. And in general, what this means is they are going to guess how many links on the internet ought to be "nofollow," and reduce the value of all links by that amount.

I've always interpreted grey hat to mean "It's not against the TOS, but it probably should be." Which inherently says "unethical" in my book, because if you think something ought to be wrong? You certainly shouldn't be doing it.

This is a crucial distinction, though. The overwhelming majority of SEO doesn't play by the rules. There's a spirit to those rules which is being violated.

Search engines are always trying to rank usability. That's what nobody really seems to get. Every algorithm the search engines create and use has one and only one purpose: to produce, at the VERY TOP of the FIRST page, the EXACT place the user wants to go. To allow every single searcher to confidently type in their query, click "I'm feeling lucky," and get exactly what they wanted.

If you are doing anything other than trying to produce exactly what your visitors want, you have to worry about algorithm changes and page rank and sandboxing and link building and bookmarking and all that crap. But there is an alternative, and it should be obvious.

 

Should be LOL

Trouble is you can keep repeating it until you are blue in the face and come back here to DP an hour later and see masses of people giving the "so called SEO advice" of "Build Links". (When SEO is not link building imho!)

Here is my philosophy >

Befor you hit put in ftp client or befor you hit publish in your WordPress blog or befor you publish by whatver manner you use think

Would I like to find this info, this product, this service, this bit of fun for the search term that I have targted?

Also would I be happy my Father My Mother My Huband My Wife My Son My Daughter or my best friend found this content for the search term they queried?

If not STOP "Click delete and then empty your recycle/trash and forget it."

If on the other hand you believe what you are publishing adds value and fits the bill for what surfers (That's me you and everyone else) would be happy to find so they can find out what they need to know or can put what they need to buy in front of them or that will put a smile on their face and that helps the search engine produce better results so we all don't all have to waste our time trawling through a load of old trash crud "THEN HIT PUBLISH AS YOU GOT SEO RIGHT SIR!"

That's what SEO is about to me. Improving search results so we all find what we need more easily.

Maybe thats why if You are Feeling Lucky and Google "Commssion the best SEO - it is me you find!

 

Hilton Paris?

Nah, I'm guessing your K.D. Mains - "Commission the best SEO" is the proper term. Attention to detail, man.

 

LOL OOps

I am both K (Keith) D Mains and Hilton Paris is my SEO Cartoon Character site.

I thought Hilton Paris would make for a fun tongue in cheek jokey approach after finding it had been dropped and abandoned.

 

I am half and half with you on this.

My good side agrees with you but my business nature stands firm.

At the end of the day 99% of the time, there are no ethics in business, just good business.

Once I earn what I need, I plan to heave this trade away and look after and help others day to day for the rest of my life. I guess it's intentional redemption but I have always wanted to be in the financial position to do it...

 

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Just to clarify, I didn't say they were flat out worthless... I said they were worthless from an SEO perspective (i.e. they do not help your page rank). They can still drive traffic to your site, they just don't help your rankings.

I know what nofollow is for. You're right, it's to say this is NOT an endorsement of that site I'm linking too. In otherwords, I'm not willing to vouche for that site, I don't 100% trust that they are not doing bad things, so don't penalize me for promoting a bad neighborhood site should the site I'm linking to get caught violating Google's guidelines.

I've spoken w/ Cutts on several occasions over the past several years, asked him specifically about nofollow, listened to him answer numerous questions between sessions, at lunch, and at other functions at Pubcon the last 3 yrs about nofollow, watched his videos on nofollow, read his and other Googlers posts on their blogs and the Google Help Forums... talked to Google engineers in meetings between our company and theirs... etc.

Everything he has said (and everything every other Googler has said) is that applying rel="nofollow" to a link causes page rank to NOT flow to the linked to page, doesn't help the linked to page rank AT ALL (so the page doesn't get credit for the link OR the link text), and that Google does NOT follow the link to discover other pages. They might discover the page through other followed links to the same, but not the nofollowed link. More importantly everything I've tested says this is true as well. I think I'm going to devise a test to show that they do not help you rank at all. I have one in mind. Other search engines may still count the link and link text but Google does not. Cutts has stated emphatically that even a nofollow link from wikipedia.com to your URL will not help your URL rank at all.

I don't think nofollow is being abused. 99.9% of blogs nofollow blog comments... which is great IMO. Bloggers have to go out of their way to nofollow links in their posts so typically all links embedded in posts on blogs are followed by default. Blog comment spam was drastically reduced after nofollow at the link level was introduced. Forums can also use it to keep spammers away.

Sure some people misuse it. 99% of those are people who "think" they know about SEO but don't. So they screw themselves by nofollowing internal links thinking they are PR sculpting. That's what they get for using it the wrong way.

I agree a lot of people don't know the difference between nofollow at a link level and disallow in robots.txt or nofollow in a meta robots tag. They all do different things... 99.99% of people who call themselves SEOs even think that disallow: in a robots.txt file will prevent the disallowed page(s) from being listed in their index and SERPs. Not true.

Yes... SEOs tried to use nofollow to sculpt the way PR was passed around the site. But Google "says" they have fixed it so that rather than passing the extra nofollowed juice out on the remain followed outbound links, it is simply lost, goes into a black hole, is wasted. So PR sculpting w/ nofollow is essentially dead.

Nofollow will likely never be ignored by Google. It basically killed the blackhats and spammers from using comment spamming to manipulate the SERPs.

To each his own... I follow the TOS and Webmaster Guidelines. If Google didn't like something or thought it was unethical, they would add it to their guidelines, change their ranking algorithm and/or they would react to it other ways like they did by coming up with rel="nofollow" to combat comment spam shortly after blogs became popular targets for spammers.

For the past several years I have SEO'd a PR7 commercial site in a VERY competive business that 85% of US households would recognize if I mentioned it here. Everything there was above board... It had to be. The site is the the company's only connection to customers. They are a strictly online company. And when 100s of millions of dollars per year are at stake, you don't risk getting kicked out of the SERPs by doing things that could ever be considered during the manual review by a Googler as a violation.

Personally I consider ALL unnatural link building methods like forum sigs, blog commenting, article submission, link baiting, widget distribution with links in widget back to your site... anything where YOU are planting links on the sites of others... to be "gray hat". Link building in general is probably all gray or black hat.

Don't think for a minute that if Google thinks a site is violating the "spirit" of the rule that they won't slap them with a penalty. That's what spam reports and manual reviews are for. And they DO penalize for violating the spirit of the rule. It's ultimately up to the interpretation of the rule by the Googler who reviews your site.

I think you're naive if you really believe that Google's and every other search engine's goal is to always put what the user is looking for at the top. The search engines are businesses... These are not "not for profit" organizations.

Have you every heard of Yahoo! SSP? We paid sometimes $50+K per month for SSP at Yahoo for VERY competitive 1 and 2 word keyword phrases when people clicked on our organic links in their SERPs... and ranked #1 for like 8 years for literally hundreds of those terms. Last March we let the longstanding contract expire. The VERY DAY it expired our rankings went from #1 to 20-30 and stayed there... and our site has 4.7 million backlinks according to site explorer. 3 months later we reinstated the contract. On the day the SSP feed went live, our rankings there jumped right back to #1. This is but one example of business first... then users... at the search engines.

So saying EVERY search engine is trying to give users EXACTLY what they are looking for is very naive. Yahoo!, Bing, Google are businesses... They give people what they are looking for in a way that maximizes their quarterly earninges.



Bottomline:

You seem to be an idealist... I am a realist. Things in life are rarely the way they "should be". They are rarely "fair" to everyone. But such is life.

You can avoid SEO'ing your sites because you think it's unethical. I'll continue to follow the TOS and webmaster guidelines because I believe that if it's not "against their TOS and guidelines" then it's within my rights to do so. Time will tell which approach leads to more successful, more popular, more accessable, more profitable sites.

 

It's funny you should mention "Grey Hat"

I employ what is regarded (so I have heard) as a Grey Hat technique on some of my sites.

The technique is

Cross linking my own sites which are all on the same server.

This practice does not seem to have any adverse effect on my sites tbh and unless it does so I will continue to do so.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all list me as #1 for the "Worlds Best SEO Writer" as well as listing me either in 1st position for "hire the best SEO" or "commission the best SEO" or "Commission SEO or "Commission the best search engine optimizer" "Commission the best search engine optimiser" UK English or just plain "Commission search engine optimiser" so I must be doing something right even though I use this so called "Grey Hat tactic.

Cross linking my sites on my network on the same server. Grey Hat ?? Really why? I do not feel I am doing anything wrong tbh

I also have number 1 on Google, Yahoo and Bing for every London Borough and the acronym SEO yet I openly admit to using the so called grey hat tactic of cross linking my sites, which as I said are all on the same server/ip, so I figure the SE's are about as bothered about this practise as I am about not being number 1 and only having a top three listing on occasions.

Heck Yahoo have me as #1 for "hire SEO"

The funny thing is though

I don't even do linking anywhere else!

 

So wait. I say that a "nofollow" link is still worth something. You say a "nofollow" link is still worth something. And... where are we disagreeing?

And yet...

So if a lot of people don't know the difference, wouldn't that mean a lot of people are misusing them?

Not really. It's just that now they have to search for the "dofollow" blogs and forums, instead of just picking them at random. They even start their own.

Google is not like your average little software company that can go "ooh, we don't like that, hey Bobby put that in our terms of service." Adding something to the guidelines is a process that doesn't happen overnight - let alone changing the algorithm or inventing new nonstandard HTML attributes.

I don't consider it unnatural to post your own link in a forum or community where you are identifying yourself as yourself, and not in any way concealing that this is your site that you own. This includes whois privacy, which is simply unethical IMO. If you are an honest and upstanding person doing business honestly, you don't need it.

Don't think for a minute that Google is going to send a human being to review the posts from some schmuck on a forum to see if they're spam or not.

Google can't police the whole internet, and I for one don't want them to. I consider grey and black hat SEO to be just like marijuana and cocaine, respectively: if you use them, I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch over it, but I'm not smoking any weed with you - and I'm not even staying in the same room when you start cutting lines on the conference table.

There are two kinds of businesses.

There are, on the one hand, the ones that try to extract more and more money from their customers. These businesses fall over and die. They may limp along for a very long time indeed, like IBM is doing, and like Yahoo! is doing... but they die.

And then there are the ones that actively try to deliver what their customers want. These companies grow, and thrive, and rake in money hand over fist. Like Google. Like Microsoft. Like Coca-Cola, who trashed New Coke because the customers didn't like it. Millions of dollars in product development, BILLIONS of dollars in "inapplicable inventory," FLUSHED. Because the customer didn't like it.

Google has a particularly strange case, because alone among their competitors they have a consumer who is not their customer - and they've sided with the consumer. This is shocking. Microsoft's consumer is, in almost every case, also their customer. Yahoo! has a consumer that is not their customer, but they have sided with the customer.

And when I've looked at companies over the years, I see two major patterns when the consumer is not the customer: first, the company ALWAYS sides with the customer; second, the company ALWAYS fails. Google is doing something different.

And that's not idealism. That's as realistic as it gets. Any search engine that does not try to deliver the best possible results to every visitor as its top priority will fail. And you can quote me on that.

 

Your last sentence is so Oh So Right CDarlock

If Google dropped natural / organic searches in favour of paid ones and didn't point out "paid/sponsored" listings they would get dropped like a brick by internet users/surfers IMHO!

Content is King, has always been and will remain so and when people work towards helping improve search results by supplying the most likely relevant results without trickery they help improve search results for us all and keep search engines viable whilst at the same time keeping Content the King.

Content being relevant and the most useful words that match the search query of course!

 

You can convert your SEO efforts to defend these actually.

I was too much irritated to see too many junk sites coming up in the Search when I was seriously searching for some things regularly. It sounds funny but I used to go directly to 5th to 10th pages of Google results to get some good information.. ha ha

Finally I did one thing. I collected all those information and developed a site with all those information or Directions on how to get those information.

Then I put all my efforts to bring it to top for those particular keywords I used. Now my site comes in top 10 for almost all of those keywords. I am sure many people are getting help from that

I might not be having all information in my site, but I try to give atleast a reference to all those good information I used to get from the 5th to 10th pages

 

Well SEO does not equal to spam, it all depends on how you do it.

 

Could you please explain what you mean by that in more detail, Organs?

Why do a lot of people so senstive on the subject of SEO? People make a living from using it and helping others with it, do people think it is a higher form of cheating?

 

Who cares of it's unethical, it works.

I'll tell you what, I'll stop spamming links when you make the following simply go away forever:

-All those annoying flyers that get tossed onto my windshield when I'm in the mall
-Door-to-door sales people (whether they are selling their religion or some stupid product)
-Pop-up/Pop-under ads
-Spyware

Those are bigger problems than link building, but they work around the same concept of shotgun marketing - cover everything with as much of your crap as possible and it will bring in the money.

 

How are *these* things conncted to SEO?

 

It's called an analogy, or applying the basic concept of one situation to another.

Link building works on the concept of word-of-mouth. Link spammers take this concept by getting as much word out as possible. The same concept applies to annoying ads, door-to-door sales people, window flyers, etc.

Think of your car as a website. I come around and plaster a flyer to your windshield (that's a backlink). I do it to all 500 cars in the mall parking lot to get 500 links.

Is that unethical? Hell yes. But it works. Out of those 500 spams, somebody will be dumb enough to actually use the flyer and convert into a sale.

So you figure out how to make people stop doing shit like that as it's way more annoying, then we'll work out how to deal with link spammers.

 

I think he means there are black hat and white hat practices Fayder.

White Hat is using good solid SEO that is in accordance with Search Engines wishes/guideleines

Black Hat tactics use tricks that will get you penalised or even banned from the search engines index if/when caught

 

But SEs (specially Google) has high quality algorithm that it can't be bypass 100%.

 

Don't wait the fruit to fall from the tree. Grab it! Otherwise sit there and wait for 10 years.

 

It's not unethical - it's too much of a grey area to be unethical

for example, we perform on-site SEO to enhance our sites for the search engines. if this is okay, how is backlinking not? i understand where you are coming from, but at what point does SEO become unethical?

Essentially everything you do is designed to improve your rankings in the search engines - whether that be bashing out loads of content or submitting your site to directories - people will do whatever it takes to grow their traffic.

There are unethical SEO techniques for example using hidden text - that's deceptive to users and search engines and could probably be defined as truly unethical, but I don't think intelligent linking campaigns are unethical at all.

I used to part-own an online clothing store and let me tell you, if we didn't do link building how would we stand up against the multi million pound businesses such as Next and Asos (that for the record get coverage on top fashion sites and the BBC). if anything, link building helps the little guy fight against the monopoly, which arguably is the real unethical force here.

ADDITION: a big thank you for starting this thread - it's the first interesting topic i've seen on here in a long while!

 

"I hate these things. I will do something similar to someone else."

You know, I already don't like you.