Ethical search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are crucial when planning an SEO campaign, or when generally maintaining the SEO of your website.

It’s referred to quite simply as a ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat’ approach to Search Engine Optimization – though there’s often ‘grey areas’ between the two. Most often ‘white hat’ relates to SEO methods that are inline with search engine guidelines and follow the SEO accepted code of conduct. ‘Black hat’ relates to Search Engine Optimization methods developed solely to manipulate search engines into giving your website high page rankings. Search engines’ punishment for ‘black hat’ SEO methods can be the banning of your website from their result lists. Therefore it’s vital you have a broad understanding of ethical Search Engine Optimization.

What’s unethical?

Keyword stuffing

The use of keywords is one of the most common SEO techniques, but excessively flooding your website content with keywords – or even hiding them in the website’s code – makes the content irrelevant to online users. The editorial content should still be engaging and relevant to users while still retaining SEO Keywords.

Unrelated keywords

This is the use of keywords that are not directly linked to the product or service on the website. For example, a website selling luxury holiday packages that lists the names of celebrities without providing such information. This lures the traffic that’s looking for celebrities to the website – without providing the relevant information being searched for by the user.

Page cloaking

This is a slightly more technical form of Unethical SEO but it’s a technical method where different webpages are created to be delivered under different conditions. The pages are designed for search engines and humans – the ones for search engines have been optimised, and the ones for humans have not. The optimised pages are generally not aesthetically appealing as the ones created for humans. This prevents search engines from grading the actual pages seen by a human – which reduces the ability to provide relevant search results to the online user.

Mirror websites

This is often a sincere accidental error when building up Search Engine Optimization for a website. When information is gathered by search engines all identical data is considered ‘duplicate’. Sites with large amounts of duplicate content may be treated as spam by search engines and could be removed from their search indexes.

Intentional spelling mistakes

This occurs when popular names are often purposefully misspelled, for example ‘airfairs’ instead of ‘airfares’.

Code swapping

This is generally a short term benefit – before the search engine identifies the change. Code swapping is when an established top ranking web page is changed to another page that is irrelevant to the search.

Scraper sites (or data blogs with no distinctive content)

Importing content from one site to another is now very simple, this is called RSS – or ‘really simple syndication’. Blogs can be used this way and the content can be duplicated across hundreds of websites – with the original content only slightly altered. This is boosted by Google’s AdWords, which is a business strategy aimed at using content to build web pages to intentionally attract ad-clicks.

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