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[Marketing Guy]

Are you black hat or white hat? Or somewhere in between?

"Ethics" and "SEO" are two terms I really don't like to use together - it ends up in endless debates about which technique lies in which camp (and generally the thought is a lot of areas are becoming a lot more "grey").

My take on it all is that ethics only come into play when you are delivering a service. What you do with your own sites is your own choice and certainly not an ethical concern. Of course the debate arises when your choices begin to impact others (competition, search engines, innocent sites).

Example - the Google Florida update which implemented a series of measures the effect of which ultimately became named the Google "sandbox". It was basically a measure (or number of measures) put in place to counteract overnight success using various SEO techniques.

While this did go to some extent to sooth the strain of spam on Google's index - how many new (oblivious) businesses setup since 2003 and couldn't achieve the rankings they otherwise would have? How much harder was life on the web for them? Is it an ethical concern anyway?

Certianly SEO's benefited - we were suddenly armed with very valuable knowledge that wasn't otherwise freely available (at least to the extent as it once was) - agency / freelance / consultancy business has since boomed. Maybe it would have anyway as the competition increased.

The point is, that this consequence was brought on the online commerce world by a number of SEO's (a relatively small number in comparison to the overall online business presence at the time) who chose to push the limits of what they could get away with.

No doubt some of them dwindled out of existence (not literally! :p) at the time, but many continued to adapt and profit, as did many others in the online world.

Knowing that search engines will adapt to agressive spamming - does ethics come into play when this will affect countless others? Or is it just business?

Any thoughts?
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- Marketing Guy
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Search Engine Marketing
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