Anyone who attended Brighton SEO earlier in the year (and didn’t succumb to the lure of the pub before the last session) would have sat and listened, with varying levels of interest, to the panel debate on ‘is there such a thing as ethical SEO’. While I sat and took in the tennis-like back and forth discussion of a topic never likely to be fully covered in 45 minutes, I began to ponder my own views on both ethics and where they sit with SEO.
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Ethics for SEO agencies
Working for an SEO agency, you end up working for a multitude of different clients, in a whole myriad of sectors, using an array of different techniques. By the very nature of doing so, you effectively become an extension of your client’s own company. So, as an agency, are you actually able to set your own ethics or do you end up adhering to those of your clients?
One of the main aspects of being an agency is that you commit to working in the best possible interests of your clients within the written or implied framework they provide. Do you have the right or obligation to enforce a different set of ethics upon them? Or are you just required to make sure they are aware of all the facts, leaving the overall ethical decisions to them?
Take, for instance, a situation where a client approaches you and asks you to buy a number links on leading newspaper sites (ignoring for now any discussion of the effectiveness of this tactic). For a start, is this unethical? It is certainly seen by most as a pretty shady area, but how far does this differ from paying for advertising? Is it merely the fact that it does not adhere to Google’s guidelines that it is seen as bad?
Secondly, if you see this as an unethical tactic, should you then refuse or are you bound by the fact that you are being paid to carry out the wishes of another company? If that company is fully aware of the risks, and they are happy to accept them, are you really being unethical by buying the links?
Finally, if this is by far the best tactic to achieve the results that they desire, are you being unethical by refusing to use the best possible tactics available?
Some hard questions
This may seem like an odd question to most, but I’m sure the agency owners will have come across it on numerous occasions: what are your ethics worth? Upon being presented with a request from a client to engage in something ethically questionable, there are some pretty big questions to ask. The first is: what is your own ethical reputation worth? If you have built a company on the fact that you only engage in ethical practices, can you afford to be caught doing something unethical? And, if you were caught being unethical, would this reflect badly on the other clients that you work for? Finally, if you refuse to do it, are you going to lose the client to someone who will, and can you afford for that to happen?
Ethics are subjective
One of the main problems is that ethics are, by their very nature, subjective, and as a result it is impossible to have any ethical absolutes. Furthermore, what is seen as ethical evolves over time, meaning that what may be seen as ethical today may not necessarily be ethical tomorrow. It also becomes increasingly difficult when there are more factors than just tactics involved… would a completely ethical link building campaign, for a site seen by many as being unethical, be ethical and vice versa? I’m sure if you ask the guys at Bright Builders they would have some strong views (although that is more of a legal/illegal thing).
What can you do as an agency?
You’ll probably have noticed that I have posed a lot of questions without really answering any of them. There are a couple of reasons for this, partially because I wanted to leave scope for discussion, but mainly because every agency and SEO will have their own opinions.
So as an agency, what can you do? To start with, I think you have to sit down as a team and discuss what approaches you are happy with and which you aren’t. You will have to cover whether you have a ‘one size fits all’ ethical policy, or if it will be tailored to specific clients, and what you will do if any of your client ask you to step past the line.
Once this is done, you need to make sure you get it down in writing and make sure everyone is 100% clear about what it is and why it’s there, and then make it part of your staff induction. There’s no point in having a policy if even one person is going to ignore it.
Finally, you need to communicate that policy to both your existing and new clients so that you are both happy with where you stand.
Side points
There are a couple of points I consciously chose not really to discuss in the post, as they are slightly different applications.
The first is that, as an agency, you are both ethically and legally obliged to carry out the contracted work to the best of your ability. If you are knowingly employing tactics that you know won’t be effective or you are billing for hours you’re not working, then you can’t really claim to be ethical. At the same time, if you have tried all the options available and you know the results your client is looking for aren’t achievable, if you want to be considered ethical you need to be honest with them and let them know. This is something that as an agency we have done previously.
My final point goes back to some of the actual discussions at BrightonSEO, where a couple of people implied, and in some case actually came out and said, that SEO as an industry was unethical and likened it to the banking industry. While I’m sure there are SEOs and agencies out there who are obviously and unashamedly unethical and may rip people off, the industry as a whole doesn’t. Having worked previously in both the mobile phone retail market and insurance sales, I can say that the SEO industry holds itself to much higher standards and, unofficially at least, is proactive at self-regulation. Personally I am reassured by what I see on a daily basis and at conferences and networking events, as it is clear that the vast majority of the industry is ethical and most work hard to provide both the services and results that they sell.
*Image credit: That Dam Kat on Flickr.
Nice one here Matthew! Always an interesting topic and not far off from a post I was thinking about writing (and may still write at some point) along the lines of “What’s Right vs. What Works”
It’s tough when those two things aren’t always the same but I suppose it’s all about calculated risks, knowing the market, and only doing that with which you are comfortable (very much to your “ethics are subjective” point).
It would be a lot easier for everyone if Google did reward the ethical practices most often rather than just sometimes (whilst letting things go completely in other instances). It makes it a very difficult world to navigate and makes it very easy for people to cross their ethical boundaries.
Transparency, acknowledgement of any risks taken and always staying inside of the law is the name of the game for me but as you say, everyone has their own moral compass and you can’t fault the folks who are tempted to do what works instead of what’s right.
I think ethics in the SEO need to be addressed more often. Most people tend to examine actually SEO techniques and try to decide whether they are ethical or not…but can a tactic be ethical or unethical? While it was a great post I feel it covers basic business ethics not necessarily the ethics of SEO.
Hi Sam,
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
It definitely gets difficult when everyone seems to play by their own rules, so effectively you’re not competing on a level playing field and, as you mention, Google can be a bit hit or miss with penalties or rewards. There is defintely temptation.
It’s interesting in SEO how different sectors seem to have completely different approaches and what everyone feels is acceptable. For example some sectors everyone seems to be into full scale and fairly deceptive comment spam, whereas other sectors nobody does it. But i guess that’s definitely down to “what’s right vs what works”.
I feel SEO is a completely ethical activity only when we are not compromising on user experience. Spamming, link farming, cloaking, duplicate content are some techniques which generally SEO guys use but it is pointless to try to fool the search engine spider, because in the longer run you are going to be found & penalized by Google.
I guess we all need to do our due deligence before using any SEO company.
No SEO company can guaranteed you first ranking even how good they are.
Fascinating post Matt, and one that I’m sure we’ll keep debating as long as there is SEO. It’s definitely a tricky area.. I’m finding it hard to formulate my thoughts into intelligent and coherent sentences – bso I’ll just say, thanks for making me think!
Good post! In my opinion its always advisable to adopt ethical SEO. May be it takes time to achieve desired result but the result is the consistent one. There is no short cut of success.
To your point, ethics is complete subjective. But IMO, where a company like Google holds a monopoly on the industry and can dictate who can rank and can’t rank for paid and natural rankings, that is the element which is unethical and unhealthy in the industry. That Google has different rules for different industries makes the boundaries of ethics impossible to judge makes talk of ethics superfluous. Ethics for me in the current environment (as Sam you elude to!) is about being transparent and staying the right side of the law and nothing more.
I think this post http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/moral-judgments-in-seo-12430 and all the subsequent comments pretty much sum up this topic!
Thanks for taking the time to comment on the post.
Shreyas – You’re definitely right about always getting caught in the long run if you engage in the shadier aspects of SEO, its cat and mouse. Oddly some great ethical link building methods can be derived from some really unethical ones. Will Reynolds or Martin Macdonald (i think) did a really great presentation at the link love conference on a similar topic, worth checking out if it’s still knocking around. Operating in Google’s guidelines or not doesn’t always dictate how ethical you are though.
Lionel – Any firm selling on the guarantee of a top or first page listing are definitely unethical (in my opinion anyway). There is no way you can guarantee a position and usually they operate with T&Cs that will give them a get out clause. Sales pitches in all industries is full of promises that can’t be kept unfortunately. Anyway, companies are better off selling on the likely ROI, that’s what companies should be concerned with.
Katie – Glad i made you think, was kind of the intention. It’s hard to form any concrete positions and it is definitely be an on-going issue. It gets even more complicated as an employee of an agency, do you work within your own ethical framework, that of your employers or that of your clients?
acams – completely agree, there are no shortcuts in SEO. At least not ones that won’t end up making you have to work harder in the long run.
Chee Ho Wan – Search being dominated by one company definitely makes things harder, and may not be healthy in the long run. It’s amazing the amount of results you get when you look at ethics that only refer to Google’s guidelines. They are only the guidelines for one company after all. I find the paid links area interesting, you can’t pay a third party site for a link to help you achieve first page listings, but you can pay Google for a first page listing in the form of PPC advertising (even for completely unrelated terms). There are obviously big differences in what you’re paying for, but if they are marked as sponsored links, is buying a link in a blog post that different?
Paul – haven’t seen that post, thanks for the heads up.