Ethical seo
"Ethical SEO" applies to SEO techniques, not to individual SEOpractitioners. It's important to make this distinction between peopleand techniques. SEO practitioners may behave ethically (or what theybelieve is ethically) towards their clients. This does not mean thattheir practises are ethical or in anyone's ultimate interests but theirown.
A range of strategies and tactics are available inorder to perform search engine optimization. Which are ethical andwhich are unethical?
Drawing upon the document "A Framework For Ethical Decision Making" (from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University), the most ethical SEO technique is the one that
- produces the most good and does the least harm
- respects the rights and dignity of all stakeholders and treats all stakeholders fairly
- promotes the common good
- helps all participate more fully in the goods we share as a community and a society
- enables the deepening or development of those virtues or character traits that we value as individuals, professions and members of a society
Thesearch marketing stakeholders are those who have something to gain orlose as a result of search marketing taking place. As such, there arefour sets of stakeholders:
- Searchers
- Search Engines
- Site owners, their employees and their agents
- The Web as a whole
Searchershave something to gain if they obtain the search results that bestmatch their queries and, consequently, something to lose if they cannotdo this. Therefore, any aspect of search engine marketing (whetherperpetrated by search engines, site owners or another party) thatdeliberately does not provide searchers with search results that bestmatch their query is unethical from the searchers' perspective. Anexample of unethical practises in this area is advertisementsmasquerading as objective search results - it's important thatadvertisements are clearly labelled so that searchers can tell whenthey are being advertised to and when they are not.
Searchengines have something to gain if they can attract a market ofsearchers that appreciates and trusts the search results and willconsequently keep coming back to the search engine. Search engines havesomething to lose – their market of searchers - if they fail to deliverrelevant, objective search results or if they lose the trust of theirsearchers.
A site owner and everybody that acts on behalf ofthat site owner (including employees and agents) is a singlestakeholder when evaluating the ethics of various search engineoptimization techniques. It is for this reason that arguments about theway clients are treated by SEOs, although important in other contexts,are redundant when evaluating ethical optimization techniques –because, as far as other stakeholders are concerned, the site owner andtheir SEO are the same entity. Site owners have something to gain byattracting searchers (self-qualified, relevant traffic) to their site,and they have the most to gain if those searchers convert intosomething meaningful. Conversions range from reading a message tobecoming a lifetime customer.
From a site owner'sperspective, the action that does the most good and the least harm isthe one that recognises the fundamental reason why a site is notperforming optimally in search results; and fixes that fundamentalproblem; thus improving the site, the search results and the Web as awhole.
The action that does the least good and the most harmis the deception of search engines in order to achieve a placement insearch results that is not warranted by the content that searchers see.This does not improve the site; in addition, it worsens the searchresults, and thereby the Web as a whole. Such actions effectivelyremove the role of determining relevance from the search engines, andplace it instead with site owners. When site owners use deception toinfluence relevancy, the quality, diversity and utility of searchresults is lost to deceptive commercial influences.
The Webas a whole has something to gain if search engines improve the quality,diversity and utility of their search results, and something to lose ifsearch engines fail to do this or are prevented from doing so. Searchengines are an important part of the information architecture of theWeb.
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