The history of the globe has, in all cultures and nations, drawn inspiration from the battle of good verses evil. Stories tell of the dreaded evil genius is normally halted by a idol.
In the early days of Hollywood, before the advent of colour film, the Western was the method to tell stories of goodies and bad guys. The most straightforward way to tell who represented which side was the crafty use of hats. Good folks used white, bad folks used black.
And it is similar with online marketing, here ethical considerations have a baring on all involved in looking for, or offering information on the web. Or there are methods in which search engines can be skewed in order to direct searchers to a location that really isn’t going to answer their need, but does place that site in a leading Search Engine Placement listing in the search results.
Disreputable Search Engine Optimisation uses processes which will propel its chosen site up the listing for search engine results. These methods can include hidden words, keyword stuffing or the use of doorways. The off page optimisation involves writing articles which are not destined to be read by human eyes, but rather to be seen by search engines. Hidden words are simply that, by swaping the font colour to the same as the background of the page, you can write incomprehensible drivel by just trotting out keywords without a searcher being able to see them.
Keyword stuffing merely comprises ofconsists of overloading an article with the keywords that are appropriate to a search. They don’t improve the readability but they do get crawled by search engines. Doorway pages use links to encourage a search engine spider to follow. This will involve using hidden text and meta refresh which sends a user away from the site they are on and wanted to go, to the one the SEO wants the user to visit, sometimes these are not necessarily the same thing.
Search engine providers have a low opinion of such behaviour however, because they see it as impinging on the accuracy of their service to users. For that reason they will frequently decide to bar offending websites from their service totally and refuse to show them in search results. This will not be welcomed by a client who is paying a Website Optimization Company and is expecting to produce business or interest in what they do.
So is unprincipled SEO always a bad way to conduct Online Marketing? Usually, it is. After all, if someone sets up a web site, it would seem sensible that they want Internet users to go there and see what it says or offers. However, the interest in taking shortcuts can also indicate that perhaps the site is not expecting to be online for very long. This would raise suspicions in many cases since most companies setting up a website would hope to be trading for years to come. Clearly some have a natural shelf life. The official page promoting a one off event has a well defined cut off date but they wouldn’t want to do something that may see their site become blacklisted before the event has started.
It’s difficult to see how unprincipled SEO can be positive unless the optimiser is promising clients quick results and is more concerned about doing that than retaining the client for the long term. Search engines play a vital role to anyone with a website. So why does something that is likely to draw harmful attention to it and risk the potential of seeing it removed from the view of potential customers? And what of those clients who are misdirected to a site which doesn’t have anything that they are actually looking for? They will take a dim view if they ever do require something from that site and may go hunting for someone that they have more reason to trust.
Keeping customers, search engines and searchers onside may be a lengthly Online Marketing strategy, but the benefits to all are far better.
