Despite SEO companies in recent years working very hard to try and clean up the, perhaps slightly dubious, reputation of search engine optimisation techniques, has this hard work actually filtered down to the businesses and clients who could benefit from SEO?

Thanks to years of prevalent black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, hiding text, cloaking web pages, creating link farms and the like, many people still seem to think that the real motivation behind optimising your website it to cheat the search engines and fool them into thinking that your website is better than it is.  Because search engines are so proactive in their fight against spamdexing and these various techniques, black hatters are also upping their game.  There are Black hat SEO forums which charge users substantial amounts of money to join and there they share the latest techniques they have discovered for fooling Google or tricking Yahoo.

Then we have ‘ethical’ SEO.  Techniques which we claim work with search engines rather than against them, to produce the best results for the user rather than just getting our client to the top of the results lists through whatever means we have at our disposal.  By optimising websites to represent themselves honestly to search engines, do we manage to cancel out the negative associations?

A high percentage of Joe Public probably hasn’t even heard of SEO. However, most will have experienced searching for a product or service using a major search engine and having their time wasted by a clicking on a result whose website at first looks to offer what they want but on closer inspection is completely irrelevant.  These users are unlikely to know anything about ethical search engine optimisation because they don’t notice it – which of course means success for the good SEO companies, but perhaps doesn’t improve the public perception of search engine optimisation at all.

Does it matter what the public perception of search engine optimisation is?  It does if it either gives clients unrealistic expectations about how quickly a good SEO company can improve their search engine results, or puts them off the idea entirely because they don’t want their website to be completely user-unfriendly.  Of course there are many knowledgeable clients out there who do understand the differences between ethical targeted marketing and those who try to defraud the search engine systems, but that is probably because they are already using a good SEO company.

Those in the SEO industry know that spamdexing doesn’t pay in the long term.  We also know that major search engines have evolved their search criteria over the years to try and weed out the websites quickly which claim to be something that they are not just to boost their rankings.  However, working against the engines are an army of black hatters who devote their time to finding new tricks and trying to crack algorithms so that they can guarantee their clients top results very quickly by cheating the system, even if only for a while.

Can ethical SEO keep up and win the war?

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