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Is the person going to fool the user or the search engine?
Are they going to use it for the mere fact of protecting their code so that it is not stolen, like we have seen many times before.
If you want to talk about being totally ethical, then whoever wishes to do so should probably not be in the SEO business, as in a way you are going to be unethical towards the SE's.
Ethics have always been a gray area, and I think that always will be a gray area. It is one thing to resubmit your competitors site (back when this would get them banned) over and over, and it is another thing entirely to look at what they are doing in comparison to what you are doing and try to build off of that. Some may call this stealing ideas......hence, the gray area of ethics.
By Clocking; Everytime. Even if you are using a cloak to protect your code you are always showing the visitor one page and then presenting them with another. It doesn't matter if its a better version of what they searched for; its not what they searched for. To me this is unethical b/c it is intentional deception.(not saying I wouldn't do it)
As an SEO I suppose I'm not ethical. I'll cloak, steal pages, reverse engineer, get my competition banned or whatever. Business is business and I have quotas to meet.
That's an issue I am still dealing with unfortunately.
As far as cloaking goes I don't like it. It does have one good purpose in the fact it prevents theft but it leaves too much room for deception. I think that people who use it wrongly will end up having SEs ban people who use it because of the minority who use it improperly.
I take ethics seriously and make it a big part of my work. There are lots of things we could do (spam) to drive traffic but they are not right so I won't do them. I don't see anything at all unethical about what I do so I am not sure where your coming from agerhart.
Well, if I had to sum it up, I would say ethics depends on perspective.
My opinions/thoughts:
From SE perspective, SEO is unethical 90% of the time. Only things they recommend is to use relevant words in the content on your site. The algorithm should take care of the rest.
From SEP specialist's perspective, all strategies are ethical, provided that they target only the keyword combinations that are relevant to the content of the site. (This excludes stealing code, submitting competitor's sites, and other general sabotage.) If it is what your site is about, and you have a site that is worthy of a SEO campaign, why not have that site rank decently? Only thing I see being a problem here is how MUCH content you have... ex. HugeWidgetSite.com would have more information than SmallWidgetSite.com. But the SE's take care of that for us :)
I also believe that there are unethical approaches, like the afore-mentioned sabotage, stealing, and all forms of spam that trick users or direct them to sites other than those that provide the information they are looking for.
Shoot, think about if there were no spammers, and all SEO's just "fought clean" on relevant keywords only. Can you imagine how relevant the search results would be, and how much we would be HELPING the search engines? wow!
In the US damaging the competitions chances to compete on a semi-level playing field is illegal and considered unethical by the general business world. I should not attack (spam competitor listings for the purpose of getting them banned, masquerading as a competitor to discredit them, etc) the competitor but rather broadcast loudly why my (or my clients) services/products are better. This is why Microsoft is in court. More so because they hampered the competition than because they packaged the products together.
What I was trying to imply is that ethics is such a gray area that someone with a different view on ethics could see what you do as unethical.
Like I said before, when you get a new site, and you figure out what then target keywords are for the site, do you go and look at your competitors sites and what keywords they are using? I know I do.
Do you sometimes get ideas off of your competitors? I know from time to time that I do, and I do not consider this to be unethical......but some people do.
I would have to say that Travoli worded it the best when he stated that ethics is based on perspective. It is all point of view, and it changes from person to person.
Satanclaus said that he would do all of things that are generally perceived as the most unethical, but maybe to him this is not the case.....again, this changes from person to person.
But I think that there are certain things that should stay unethical no matter what. For example stealing someone else's coding or website, getting your competition banned, and reverse engineering. When you do these things not onyl are you hurting your client, but you are hurting the industry by making the SE's crack down on these sort of things.
Cloaking could be a very good thing, but there are some people that are only using for very unethical purposes, and the rest of the people who are using it legitimately are in danger of being banned by SE's like Google who claim to be cracking down.
1) The failure to exclude a SE with a robots.txt does not imply contractual consent to be spidered. The SE didn't ask; it just comes, whenever it wants. If it likes images, it grabs them. If it likes CGI, it grabs them. Sometimes it grabs them so fast (as in the case of a large CGI database), that months of tuning and programming is required on the part of the SEO to keep the site working well.
With the traffic one gets from spiders these days, compared to what one would get if all spiders were excluded, the SEO does not have the option of excluding major spiders if he wants to keep his site viable. The engine has the option of banning a site; the SEO does not often have the realistic option of excluding a major engine that brings referrals to his site.
2) Without any sort of rules operating between SE and SEO, it's difficult to argue that whatever the SEO does is unethical. The engine operators hold all the cards; they're the ones that ought to be held more accountable.
3) Both engine operators and SEOs use secret algorithms. An example of the latter might be one's particular system of optimizing a CGI system for spider tolerance. There is an entire spectrum between "no cloaking" and outright cloaking in a complex CGI site. Something as simple as making dynamic pages look like static pages might be considered a mild form of cloaking.
At the same time, the engine operators keep changing their algorithms and they also keep them secret, or even mislead SEOs about what they're doing. This could be considered "cloaking" by the engine.
If you want to talk about ethics, you have address both ends of the question -- ethics on the part of the SEOs as well as ethics on the part of the engine operators. One without the other doesn't work well.
That was a very good point that I hadn't really thought about at all. Good post.
>>>>>At the same time, the engine operators keep changing their algorithms and they also keep them secret>>>>
Absolutely true!
Excite
Fast
INK
AV
These engines tolerate bad ethics and it shows in their results. If I take any hits from any of them I assume it is just a competitor checking the competition. They are not used by serious surfers and they do not deliver quality traffic.
Are the SE's hurt? yep.
Are those who live for clicks hurt? yep.
Bad ethics bears fruit. Since I doubt that anyone really thinks they are unethical when it comes to SEO, we are kinda just taking potshots here. The engines that will remain strong will also write the rules for ethical behaviour, it won't be a subjective thing.
I doubt that any of them will find "good" reasons for cloaking or "punctuation links" and a myriad of other "stupid link tricks" (hey is that a Letterman thing or what?). It's all just loop holes for now, but won't be for long.
Maybe a site has to serve up a cookie because content is only supposed to be viewable in a particular county, or people of a certain age. Is there another example of cloaking where the actual page content would be the same for all audiences?
When working on a site, the ethical approach is to do whatever it takes to succeed, so long as it is visible, and it is not outright theft of the work (content) of someone else. If you find a killer page structure, perfect KW density, an optimal link structure, use it. There are sooooo many things that come into play in SEO, the person who merely copies others work is probably not going to last very long in the top spots, or in SEO. The person who can understand what another site has done to rank well, and improve upon the method is the one who will be around long term.
Not being technically savvy with cloaking myself, how is it pitched to clients - in terms of ethics, and longevity of the solution? Do companies want quick traffic, and not want to listen to the particulars, or ask what happens if the contract is not renewed? If I understand corrctly the traffic delivered froma cloaking campaign will begin to quickly vanish as soon as maintenance is stopped and the SE index is refreshed?
This is so true. We do work with clients who are competitors to each other. We rank both clients well though not exactly the same. Due to the wording on the sites and slightly different business focuses one will rank better for a certain keyword than another. But by using techniques that we feel work we've gotten good rankings. It is not the specific tags or the exact same phrasing that is at work here but solid (boring? :) ) work habits and study of search engines that get these results.
BTW, I think both are ethical when relevancy for the user is kept in mind
As far as PPC being worse, I disagree. At least they are totally straightforward that someone paid for the listings. And the price is in plain view for every result. Not trying to hide ANYTHING!
Really? Do you see the price paid for the ad listed at NBCi or in the AltaVista featured listings and so on?
>"case number"
What do you mean by this?
I am agree!
Self-respecting PPC's consider "conversion to sales", and do not exceed a maximum convenient bid.
It is rare to see non relevant phrase bid.
>> Any good PPC will take relevancy very seriously
>I am agree!
>Self-respecting PPC's consider "conversion to sales", and do not exceed a >maximum convenient bid.
Well, is GOTO a good PPC then?
Another point:
>>Is the person going to fool the user or the search engine?
By Clocking; Everytime. Even if you are using a cloak to protect your code you are always showing the visitor one page and then presenting them with another. It doesn't matter if its a better version of what they searched for; its not what they searched for. To me this is unethical b/c it is intentional deception.(not saying I wouldn't do it)
With PPC, you're fooling the user every time as well in the same way.
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OK, maybe the best thing would be to have a poll.
On the other hand if the end user gets what he/she was looking for and then does not BUY [convert] then 5 would have to apply.
5) Exit Consoles: NextCards and Cameras and VIAGRA and you name it until the this tire kicker runs out of memory and CRASHES.
Would that be ethical? :)
(edited by: Mike_Mackin at 10:51 pm (gmt) on July 11, 2001
What's weird is that as an SEO, when I search the internet 'for fun', I always wonder how much the top 5 sites paid to have that placement and without a doubt I look through their pages to determine how much I think they spent if anything - then I compare their rankings on other search engines. I never can seem to get away from work. :)
This thread has interesting reading. It seems I've been way under priced for a long time. I need to do something about that. :)
As an SEO I suppose I'm not ethical. I'll cloak, steal pages, reverse engineer, get my competition banned or whatever. Business is business and I have quotas to meet.
I feel stupid. I didn't know that 'reverse engineering' was considered unethical. Isn't that how you learn? By looking at someone else's work and figuring out how they did it?
-G
Is this considered ethical?
The key here is *end user*.
We are not working to sell anything to SEs, we are working to sell to end users. The more you get to satisfy them with relevant results the more they will be willing to buy what you are offering, the more you will be satisfied by the results of your action.
SEs are just the hard, narrow passage you have to go through to reach your target. No matter how you reach them, if you please them what you are doing is ethical - if you don't, you are doing something unethical no matter how ethical you tried to be.
More. Imagine living in a Society where the rules are... that you are not allowed to know which are exactly the rules. You can only *guess*. If your guess is right, you get your daily meal, if it's wrong, you starve. Trying to guess at your best (and therefore tweak your behaviour) is not unethical, the rules itself are.
Since I'm neither allowed to know which are the rules with SEs, nor to discuss them, the most ethical approach I can think of is doing anything I can do for both satisfying the end user and getting my daily meal as a result.
When you maintain a site search, it is common and good practice to have a keyword field that is essentially text that is not on the visible page, but that is still highly relevant. This gives the end user a better chance at finding the information they want.
However, when huge scale of the entire web comes into play, the rule is supposed to become "only the content actually visible to the end user matters".
That's not in the area of ethics at all, that's just the search engine's version of being pragmatic. If I can rank high for a word that's not visible on the page, but is still highly relevant, I will do it -- with no ethical concerns whatsoever.
The gray area of any subject is located between the two extremes of the scale, where most of SEO lands. Based on Aristotle's model I would think the best way to approach SEO ethics would be to look at the extremes-- what techniques would an extremely magnanimous optimizer use, and what would a slimey one use?
I would think a magnanimous SEO would let better sites win, or would improve their sites until it was the best it could be, focusing on beating lower quality ones. This would be perfect fairness in a perfect world, but not exactly SEO either.
On the slimey end of the scale, I would think using cloaking to grossly misrepresent the content of a page would fit...so would repeatedly submitting a competitor's site until it annoyed SE staff to the point of getting banned. Also misrepresenting identity, opinions, and referrals on discussion boards. I can't think of anything else that's really slimey though.
Duty to client and service to customers should superpose on the SEO ethics scale between the extremes, IMO. They're magnanimous ethics to consider too.
For what it's worth.
I do not use cloaking, but I am thinking about it.
There is a consideration in favour of cloacking: ranking fine in a search engine is not a simple recipe. Usually you need time to refine your code or discover something about the SE Algo: a lot of daily work.
You do a lot of work to have a site that is nice for SEs and for your searchers.
Suddenly it can happen that a competitors "clone" you good job and that is! You share your good job with one of your competitors!
Maybe you know that your competitors do not offer your same quality: for a searcher (client) it is not so easy to judge the quality of the company itself; he/she judges what he/she sees.
This happens out of the web too, and there is a solution that is difficult to adopt on the web: "certification".
Think about ISO, or any Association that guarantees the quality of the members.
It would be necessary, but it is not the web philosophy.
