Ethical Search Engine Marketing
October 5, 2008
Spamming search engines is by no means an ethical activity; however, there are reports of people doing so in newsletters and SEO forums all across the world. It follows naturally how it’s important to make sure one hires ethical professionals, while outsourcing for search engine optimization. If you value your websites reputation, you should always work with legitimate SEO professionals, rather than spam artists who’ll end up hurting your reputation. This is true in every industry, not just SEO. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEO Company (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.
Prospective clients are known to sometimes bear an unhealthy stance towards search engine optimization, as result of information they’ve read somewhere else. They’ll approach you and as for something like creating a set of 10 doorway domains pointing their website. The thing is they refuse your advices of optimizing the actual website; they just want to expand their network with fringe hollow domains.
You know, the kind that only the search engines will find (because you added a link way down low on the home page to a sitemap of all the doorway pages). Naturally, such pages serve only as bait; from the users standpoint they’re a nuisance, since it requires additional clicks to get to the actual site they wanted to see in the first place. So what should you do, in such as scenario: indulge the customer, or let him know that’s not a good way of optimizing a website? Certainly, creating those pages that way couldn’t really be considered unethical or anything. On the other hand, what if there was already plenty of good content in the actual website? Rather than satisfying the customer’s whim and provide him a futile service, it would be better to merely optimize the current pages in his website to match the keywords people typed in search engines.
What I’d personally do if confronted with such customer – if I was unable to convince him to pursue the ideal strategy – would be asking him to take his business elsewhere. Yeah, it’s hard to turn down some decent money that a job like that could bring. Most likely, you could achieve the requested task without breaking a sweat, through the usage of software for page generation…AND you’d just be giving the customer what he requested, right? Self-justification would have come extremely easy, as you probably realize. What kind of and SEO consultant will you be, if you aren’t capable of achieving actual results? If the buyer wanted help with a useless technique, supporting his whims would only stain your reputation. It’s always best to preserve your professional integrity than to get a specific job.
If you plan to be an actual SEO professional, it’s vital to keep focused on customers who regard you as a consultant, not a handyman. It may feel you’re at loss, when turning down customers in scenarios like the one presented in this article; however you’ll get to capitalize on that small expense, sooner than you know it. It worked for me!