All posts tagged ethics

Ethics and SEO


By On August 31, 2011 In seo With 15 Comments

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?

TechCrunch turns to Hackcrunch

“He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone.” I admit reading or rather scanning the “confidential” Twitter documents obtained by Techcrunch from a hacker and published in excerpts. Of course I was curious. On the other hand:

Was this whole Techcrunch Twitter hacked scandal worth it?

Are we wiser now? Has humanity gained some new insights? Did Techcrunch prevent a corrupt president from breaking the law?

This week three Twitter topics have caught my eye. The spectacular growth of Twitter which accelerated even beyond what we were already used to, the proliferation of Twitter tools which surpassed previous outbursts.

Also intriguing was the emergence of a Twitter ethics debate where bloggers and SEO experts debated the ethics of using Twitter for marketing purposes or the perceived lack of them.

  1. Twitter growth has been astounding both from a short term as well as long term perspective. Steve Rubel takes a very close look at these spectacular growth rates.
  2. The number of Twitter tools was always astonishing. Still we’ve seen nothiung this far. Last week it became apparent that huge Twitter tools lists are not enough anymore. Now we see plenty of specialized tools lists for different tasks. Be it follower management tools or Twitter stream analysis tools.
  3. In the SEO industry there has been an ethics problem historically. SEO was born in a time where actual optimization often failed while manipulation was easy and successful quickly. More than 10 years later you either optimize or you spam and the gray area in between is often subject of heated debates. Now that marketers and SEO experts are at the forefront of the Twitter hype this historical burden has repercussions on this new tool. So the question arose: What tactics are still acceptable and where to draw the line of unethical Twitter usage?

We used to say that one Internet year is like 7 “real life” years due to the fast changing pace of it. With Twitter it seems like one year equals twenty. Trends appear incredibly fast and issues we dealt elsewhere after years we have to face after weeks.