Search engine optimization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:09, 27 January 2004

Revision as of 02:24, 27 January 2004

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[[Google]] has a particularly ethical way of handling paid placement. Their main results are apparently uninfluenced by any payments, but paid "AdWords" drive small, graphically distinct text-only ads, so the user is able to tell which matches were the result of a payment. Also, they use various methods to ensure against even paid placement of truly irrelevant content.

==Ethical and unethical optimizations

SEOAt isits oftenworst, confusedSEO withbecomes [[spamdexing]], which is the unwanted promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through taking advantage of the search algorithms. Indeed, many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website's page rank is nothing else than spamdexing.

However, over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant traffic.

Obviously, the most ethical method is to have worthwhile content, to which a lot of people will voluntarily link. There are also few who would question the ethics of informing other relevant sites around the web of one's own content and asking for links, although as relevance diminishes this becomes a more dubious practice.

Equally, virtually no one would question the ethics of choosing the vocabulary of your site (and especially of your page titles) to emphasize words that you know are often searched for by people in your market. Again, the ethics of this becomes shadier if the words in question are not relevant.

It is certainly ethical (in fact it is highly recommended) to add a "site map" page to your site, linked either from the home page or from every page on your site. Such a page guarantees that once a spider has found your site, it will be able to traverse and index the entire site.

[[Cloaking]] - any of several means to serve up a different page to the search-engine spider than will be seen by human users - is generally considered highly unethical. The only time anything of the sort is legitimate is to present truly equivalent content for a multimedia presentation that the search engine would not be able to parse. Typically, this last, ethical use of cloaking is also a good means to provide [[accessibility]] for the blind and other similar categories of disabled people. A good benchmark on whether a given act of cloaking is ethical is precisely whether it enhances accessibility.

Most other SEO methods are generally considered to be, in varying degrees, unethical.

==Techniques==