'Ethical' SEO? - alt.internet.search-engines

Message from discussion 'Ethical' SEO?

spam...@postmaster.co.uk

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More options 5 Nov 2004, 09:38

Newsgroups: alt.internet.search-engines

From: <spam...@postmaster.co.uk>

Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 09:38:49 +0000 (UTC)

Local: Fri 5 Nov 2004 09:38

Subject: Re: 'Ethical' SEO?

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> Google is only negative, in my opinion, about people abusing SEO
> thoughts - which opens the cans of worms about what is deemed ethical
> and what is not. :)

This the main thrust of my question I suppose; what is 'ethical'?. I have
looked into doing optimisation on the site myself and looked into some
forums and newsgroups, but they are so full of contradiction and confused
people, it is difficult to draw out any concrete knowledge from them. It was
also consuming way too much of my time and detracting from my main duties;
hence we are considering hiring a professional to do it.

But when paying for a service from a professional (say an electrician), you
don't expect to have to hang a sign on your door saying that the electrics
on the premises were done by Bob's Electricals. You pay for the service, if
they want to use you to advertise, they can pay you for the advertising
space. Unless of course they offer a sizable discount for including these
footer links.

But this is it; what exactly is 'ethical SEO'? I don't want to pay for a
service that is going to end up delivering traffic and then getting us
banned six months down the line for spammy tactics.
Every SEO company we have looked at claims to do things ethically, but BMM
is quite obviously doing things a little suspiciously. I have received a
mail in reply to this posting regarding the Alitalia site I mentioned, by
disabling JavaScript in your browser and viewing the site, the neat little
nav menu on the left is replaced with a long (much longer than the menu it
replaces) & unstyled list of internal links that do not point to the same
pages that the menu they are replacing point to. I can see that there are
good reasons to have support for non-JS capable browsers (and other forms of
accessibility), but this seems a little excessive.

Is this sort of behaviour likely to cause our site problems? Or is this the
'norm' in SEO circles? And what is classed as 'ethical'? I know there is
likely to be a fair dollop of grey in the middle, but what is
no-argument-white?

"C.W." <from_...@nomail.com> wrote in message

news:418abb61.92470411@news.prodigy.net...

> On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:04:48 GMT, SEO Dave
> <seo-dav...@AMsearch-engine-optimization-services.co.uk> wrote:

> >On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 18:27:27 +0000 (UTC), <spam...@postmaster.co.uk>
> >wrote:

> >>BMM put links into themselves on every page they build. On their smaller
> >>pages, this is a visible "Search Engine Optimisation by Big Mouth Media"
> >>tag, with a clickable link. They also list themselves, with a URL in the
> >>pages META DATA. This is free advertising for bigmouth, and greatly
improves
> >>their ranking for "Search Engine Optimisation" it appears to do nothing
for
> >>the client at all.

> >I think any SEO who does the above cares more about their own sites
> >than their clients.

> How is someone, doing work on a site and placing a link to themselves
> in the footer, any less ethical [SEO wise] than someone buying links
> that will appear on multiple pages/site-wide within someone else's
> site?

> >Also recently Google appears to be penalising sites for site wide
> >links, not all sites, just some. So far it seems only the site
> >receiving the site wide links gets a penalty (more precisely no boost
> >from the links).

> Different angle: Many site designers putting links at the bottom of
> pages they designed or work on get no perk if what you shared is above
> it true. Ok, but what if that generally isn't the reason the links are
> there anyway? So they don't get a boost, SE wise, they may still get
> some click-thrus and that is also what they wanted.

> [snip]
> Considering how
> >negative Google is regarding SEO you really don't want to tell Google
> >you have had your site optimised!

> Google is only negative, in my opinion, about people abusing SEO
> thoughts - which opens the cans of worms about what is deemed ethical
> and what is not. :)

> Carol

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