Are They Ethical: Finding the Facts about SEO Spam
by Joe Dolson (February 16, 2006)
Search engine optimization is an unavoidable buzzword for the web-based business. When your website is crucial to developing your business you need to be aware of SEO. Good, ethical SEO will help your business generate new leads, build site visits, and increase the visibility of what your company can offer. Bad SEO will do many of the same things — or, at least, will claim to do them.
As a non-technical person, how do you tell when an SEO company might be leading you down the wrong path? What key phrases should start your alarm bells ringing? How can you get solid information which will help you eliminate questionable companies?
You don't need to know the ins and outs of search engine optimization to answer all your questions. There are some great resources for research that can help you out and some big key phrases that you can keep your eyes on!
Always be wary
Read the company's information very carefully. Check their website and read their brochures. What does the site claim they'll be able to do? If they're claiming that their techniques will "guarantee you a top 10 position on major search engines" you need to take a second look.
ANY website can achieve a top 10 position for certain keyword phrases. Part of the problem is what they're claiming to be able to do: put you in the top 10. Certainly, they can do this. But for what search phrase? If you achieve great positioning for a very uncommon search phrase your overall site optimization will not be helped.
How do they claim they'll be able to help you? Do any of the following terms occur in their claims:
- Doorway page
- Satellite sites
- Search engine submission
- Mass email marketing
These terms are highly likely candidates for questionable activity. A doorway page is an access point to your site containing a high density of keywords which is not ever seen by human visitors. These are against the Google webmaster guidelines due to their misleading representation of site content. They will certainly get you banned from Google, and may be damaging in other indexes as well.
Satellite sites are sites owned and operated with optimization for your keywords which provide links to sites which share in those keywords. Although it is possible that these may be legitimate business concerns, it is highly likely that they are "link farms" — sites which exist for no purpose other than providing links to the optimization firm's clients.
You may be wondering why search engine submission is on this list. Of course you want to be in the search engines! Yes — but there is no need to pay somebody to submit your site. Unless your site has been explicitly removed from a search engine's index, for violation of their guidelines (such as SEO spam), it will be added to their index as soon as a single inbound link to it is found. You may submit your site to search engines, of course. This takes a couple of minutes, and simply informs them of your site. This may speed up the indexing of your site, it may not. There is certainly no reason to submit your site more than once.
Mass email marketing. In plainer words, spam. We're all familiar with spam. Most of us have received daily offerings for genital enlargement or great mortgage deals at some point in our lives. Some companies will want to raise the profile of your site like this, and believe me — it's not the kind of publicity you want. If you suspect a company of participating in spam marketing, this is actually fairly easy to check. Spamhaus.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to registering and making public information about known spam services. You can visit their site at http://www.spamhaus.org/ and search ROKSO (the Register of Known Spam Operations) to see whether the company you are investigating is listed.
Is this everything you need to know?
Sorry, no. Unethical SEO (or "Black hat" SEO) has many devious faces. It may not be obvious that a company engages in questionable practices. Your best protection is to become aware of what resources there are to identify unethical activities and companies. Some recommendations for your research:
- Black Hat SEO Directory
Provides extensive information about companies engaging in questionable techniques. Directory, examples, information.
- SEOmoz
An authoritative site for a consulting firm dedicated to search engine marketing and optimization. Particularly worth reading is an article called Black Hat vs. White Hat Search Spam Debate. This is an actual email conversation debating the merits and problems of each school of thought.
- The Official Google Blog
Although this site does not restrict itself to SEO information, it is very authoritative when it comes to Google's spam guidelines. Also read the official Google webmaster guidelines. They're carefully written to make sense to both a technical person and a publisher.
Does unethical SEO work?
This is an important question — and I won't beat around the bush. Yes, unethical SEO does work, in a matter of speaking. If what you want is to bring your site to the forefront immediately, but take a high risk that it will disappear from the search index after a short amount of time, then black hat SEO is highly effective. If you want to build your website into a high-quality, long-lasting business then black hat SEO will be devastating.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.
Joe Dolson is a web designer and programmer specializing in accessible web design. He's worked as a freelance consultant and designed since the beginning of 2005 and has written extensively at his private business website for accessible web design and in the InterDigital Strategies blog. His main web interests are in accessibility, useability, and ethics.
