The SEO ethics debate may be pointless, but it does spur a lot of activity. I noted a thread at SEOChat on the subject, where some disagreement between Fathom and I, along with a stereotypical quote from Mick has me reading:
Rand: Never take on two clients for the same terms without letting both of them know you’re working with someone else in the sector.
Fathom: I actually disagree here. As far a “code of conduct goes”. While there are certainly conflict of interest issues… “the term” and the “sector” have no greater impact on “results” than your “time” or “workload” when taking on “any new client” and working on any other “term” or “sector”. Also a service in the US, another in Canada, and one in UK where none ship or service outside of their geo-physical boundaries isn’t harmful to anyone – in fact it is even an asset…
IMHO not a “black & white” clause.
Mick: I dont understand this entire thread. Whats a code of conduct? if i think it is what you are on about. My rule is dog eat dog and every man/woman for him or herself. Seo without restrictions and do what is needed to get to where you need to be.
Lie, cheat, steal, decieve, work, con and huslte for survival.
Later, GBR&D points to a code of conduct that is quite lengthy, and includes some interesting elements.
The SEM will actively practice, support and promote the SEM code of ethics. (Seems a bit extreme)
Needless regular re-submission of a client website to search engines and directories. This common technique is no longer beneficial to campaign progress and may actually result in the activation of spam penalty. (As we’ve pointed out in the past, if this could hurt rankings, we’d all just do it to our competitors).
The use of cloaking or IP delivery techniques for the purpose of providing differing content to different users/user agents. (NYTimes, Salon, WashingtonPost are all guilty of this)
The use of invalid or non-compliant HTML in an effort to enhance relevancy for targeted search phrases. For example multiple instances of TITLE or META tags, or using TITLE tag that incorrectly describes the document content. (Non-compliant HTML is unethical?)
The creation of, participation in or interaction with link farms or pages featuring user added link systems. (No guestbooks, comments or webrings?)
There’s a whole host of others, but I want to get to something even more fun.
For the last 6 weeks, I’ve been proud to note that SEOmoz’s ranking factors article was listed on the Wikipedia page for SEO (under external links). However, as of a couple days ago, it was dropped when one of the editors cleared out virtually ALL the external links. He notes his reasons in the discussion thread:
(in reference to SEOmoz and another site) The above references go to non-noteworthy sources that display ads. My objection is that these links are a form of stealth advertising. The SEO page is subject to constant linkspam attacks (every SEO on the planet thinks they deserve a link here), so we have gotten very defensive about external links.
And from an opposing point of view (in reference to the removed links and other content):
The Long Term SEO section did arm the general public with information that was previously privy only to SEOs. As someone who does SEO for a living – and are therefore in a position to directly benefit from public ignorance of SEO – you were not best placed to delete large sections of the article. This is particularly inappropriate as you haven’t declared your conflict of interest here.
There’s quite a fight over this page, and one I don’t believe I’ll involve myself in. If the editors eventually decide to put back the ranking factors article, I’d be thrilled, but if they choose to leave it out since we do have ads (and are non-noteworthy), that’s their perogative.
