There is no right or wrong

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I read something a few days ago that struck a cord with me. It was about a tobacco industry spokesperson who said to his son:

There is no right or wrong. There are just arguments. If you win you are right.

That’s kind of how I view SEO. There is no right or wrong – what is ethical SEO? There’s some kind of argument that it’s bad to spam or engage in blackhat techniques and therefore blackhat is wrong.

Is it ethical to be doing SEO for companies that rip off consumers with limited financial knowledge who don’t realise that 60% APR is not cool?

It’s not clear to me how you could say that is any more or less ethical than say a creating a splog?

I saw a comment on an article vaguely about blackhat SEO. I feel it’s kind of misinformed. He talks about how you can’t be open and honest while using blackhat techniques.

You could, you could say to your client: “Today we’re going to spam your website to no 1. and then after a week or two it will probably get banned”.

That’s open and honest it just might not go down that well. You have to accept that the techniques you use to promote or optimise a website have to be proportional to the risk/reward. Can you afford for the website in question to get banned or penalized? If the answers no then don’t do anything shady. If the answers yes then spam away.

When I was working last year there was a car insurance company we worked for where we did the SEO for some of their sites and they did some inhouse SEO on some of their other smaller doorway type sites.

They did some overly aggressive link buying and managed to manipulate some pretty high rankings for that site for a brief period before it got caught out. Then there was a small uproar: blah blah spam blah blah blackhat blah blah dodgy. Who cares?

If they looked at the risk vs. reward of spamming that website to high rankings for car insurance and decided they were willing to go with it and didn’t mind if it go banned then fair play to them. They still had their main site and their other smaller sites if it did get banned.

If I was trying to be successful in a highly competitive niche I wouldn’t have a problem with performing some dirty SEO to outrank the competition. As long as you were actually providing a useful service and had a reasonable website – I don’t see the customer caring. Obviously you’d have to except that you were likely to get burnt at somepoint and have your main brand/website totally clean and just slowly build that site up organically as best you can. While that sites hanging around in the sandbox you can be ranking these other mini sites.

I’m rambling a bit now, cya..

Related posts:

1. Relative vs. absolute links revisited
2. Are Madlib Sites Whitehat?
3. Relative Vs. Absolute Links
4. You should realise that Wordpress is not right for everything
5. The big social media marketing myth

Tagged as: seo