Thread: Unethical SEO

Either way, I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect - but that's irrelevant here. :P

The point of this thread is just to ask three questions:
So - have you ever filed a spam report with Google?
Do you monitor your competition?
Do you engage in unethical SEO?

Originally Posted by Kovich

The point of this thread is just to ask three questions:
So - have you ever filed a spam report with Google?
Do you monitor your competition?
Do you engage in unethical SEO?

A don't really monitor the competition as I'm taking a long term approach. So it wouldn't matter to me what the competition is doing.

The biggest thing that my competition is doing is buying links and doing three way trades. I don't think that either are unethical. It's up to the search engines to value links and content. So I don't believe that it's my job to report sites that violate their policies.

Originally Posted by Kovich

Have you ever been to Honduras? Go there, and I bet you'll change your view.

Terrible instability there.

I have a hundred acres down there with coffee, donkeys and the usual stuff. It's not as bad as it seems.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

That Wikipedia article about crime and violence in Latin America is good example of questionable facts that have been flagged as such by Wikipedia.

Note the message at the top of the page:


Wikipedia articles are not necessarily written by professional researchers or experts in a field. They are mostly written by volunteer writers.

Wikipedia is good to find out some basic information to get an idea on who someone is or where something is located, but you are right, it's a gamble. some of the articles are simply dead wrong. People also fight the big battle of edit and delete until the pages get taken off due to no agreement being made on anything. Some have even gotten locked. Again: You cannot take everything you read there for granted, sort of like the news.

WOW! If you can manage to look for the competition, and try to analyze them, maybe you can still come up with a good marketing strategy on your side, Given on SEO environment to use that kind of strategy but the question is how will you face those kind of approach. I might be unethical to your side but for them its good for it brings positive output on their side. For now if you are looking for a long time investment for your site then you'll be in a good way.CHEERS!

So I read this post this morning about un-ethical SEO and it promoted me to join this fine forum and choose my user name as "backlinks" . . .

I don't really get the point in "ethical" and "un-ethical" . . .

What your really saying is that the other guy was more aggressive?

After all if you are engaging in any SEO at all, then by default you are doing things for the sole purpose in ranking higher.

Isn't that after all a manipulation of the SERP's?

I find that people who scream un-ethical are the same people who flat don't know what they are doing thus they must produce some argument against it.

I find that people who scream un-ethical are the same people who flat don't know what they are doing thus they must produce some argument against it.

Wow, that's a strawman argument if I've ever seen one. By that logic, if you're working to make money, instead of robbing a bank, you just don't know what you're doing.

Originally Posted by Kovich

Wow, that's a strawman argument if I've ever seen one. By that logic, if you're working to make money, instead of robbing a bank, you just don't know what you're doing.

Not at all . . . the logic is that if you are doing SEO you are manipulating the engines in some way.

Thus all SEO is either un-thical or ethical, depending on how you look at it.

The delineation would then be automation?

Aren't we all thankful that Henry Ford decided to automate (assembly line) his business.

So I am all for automating my business, building backlinks, spinning content, and deploying mass link farms.

At the end of the day, it just makes my job easier.

Also your response doesn't hold weight because robbing banks is illegal, build a link farm or stuffing keywords is not. So the comparison is simply not valid.

The comparison is completely valid. The legality or illegality is irrelevant.

It sounds like your methods (especially the 'deploying mass link farms') will just end up with you getting penalized by the search engines. Let me know how that turns out for you. Easier is not always better. Just because something is automated, doesn't necessarily make it better. And search engines promote SEO - but they have regulations and guidelines. So no, it's not unethical to engage in standard SEO. It's unethical to engage in SEO that violates the search engine's rules and guidelines.

Following the rules, working hard, and doing things the right way pays off now and in the future. Trying to cheat the system is wrong.

It really gets down to what you call "unethical" SEO.

MC is asking for linkspam reports for spammy links. Spammy links are defined as paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.

So the question is whether a paid link is unethical; because, Google tells us that its unethical?

I'm also wondering what a blog spammer is?

Btw, Google is moving away from using the anonymous spam report form. You must now sign in with a Google account to use the spamreport form.

Calling for link spam reports

Originally Posted by backlinks

Not at all . . . the logic is that if you are doing SEO you are manipulating the engines in some way.

Thus all SEO is either un-thical or ethical, depending on how you look at it.

The delineation would then be automation?

Aren't we all thankful that Henry Ford decided to automate (assembly line) his business.

So I am all for automating my business, building backlinks, spinning content, and deploying mass link farms.

At the end of the day, it just makes my job easier.

Also your response doesn't hold weight because robbing banks is illegal, build a link farm or stuffing keywords is not. So the comparison is simply not valid.

I agree with you 100 percent as SEO in itself is not something that "creates value". You create value by creating a platform such as google or twitter. SEO is the art of finding loopholes. Anybody who calls himself an "ethical SEO", I tend not to trust in real life.