Doofus - 5:04 am on Jul 18, 2001 (gmt 0)

The question of whether you pay an SEO expert to construct doorway pages, or pay an SE for placement, is a minor question, assuming that the end user is unaware of why certain keywords bring certain sites to the top in each of those cases.

A more fundamental problem, ethically speaking, is the nature of the keywords that are targeted. If the targeted keywords compete with nonprofit sites that offer substantive, noncommercial information, and cause those sites to rank so far under the optimized sites that the user doesn't notice the information due to a diminished signal-to-noise ratio, then the paid placement is unethical in both cases -- the case of the SEO _and_ the case of the unmarked or poorly marked PPC.

SEOs have a responsibility to optimize commercial sites for keywords that do not compete with nonprofit, noncommercial information. They should also offer reduced rates for legitimate nonprofits. Similarly, search engines have a responsibility to give .edu, .gov, and .org sited a "hand tweak" in the rankings. Unfortunately, the awareness of this responsibility is so low on the part of both SEOs and SEs that it takes a Ralph Nader to wake us up.

Otherwise, the World Wide Web will soon be the World Wide Wasteland. We were doing fine before Wall Street discovered us, and by now many of us feel that the dot-coms need to keep crashing, crashing, crashing. Then we'll be able to recover in about five years, at which point the voracious capitalists will start another gold rush, and ruin it once again.

I wouldn't worry about the engines crashing too, or about the SEOs running out of clients. At some point a university or foundation will sponsor something like Google, if Google can't cut it and has to sell out. Google has already made a huge contribution, simply by proving that quality engines are indeed possible if you invest a little brainpower into the algorithms.