Is Search Engine Optimization Ethical?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 3 of April , 2008 at 8:47 am

One of my readers recently commented that search engine optimization was only undertaken by those looking to scam the system. It left me wondering where the reader was coming from and what lead them to this conclusion.

Jealousy was my first thought. They look around at sites that are ranking well and as theirs isn’t, they feel they are being hard done by. However there is so much information on search engine optimization that perhaps they have simply been overwhelmed by it.

The question still remains. Is search engine optimization ethical? Of course you could turn the question around and ask, ‘are there ethical SEO practices’. The answer of course is yes, there are ethical and unethical Search Engine Optimization practices in use.

Ethics are always going to be a matter of personal belief and personal opinion. What one person considers ethical may be totally out of the ball park for another - and vice-versa.

There is surely nothing unethical about wanting to get to the top of search results page. Likewise, there is nothing unethical about working to optimize your site for best results. It is whether or not the processes you use are ethical that matters. And that is how the search engines themselves look at things.

In a round about way, my response to that question is very simple. Search engines themselves do not look on search engine optimization as being unethical, in fact they often like it. They do frown on certain techniques used and will penalize pages that use those techniques.

If search engines like to see pages that have used search engine optimization techniques to improve their placement then I am going to continue optimizing pages. A simple answer to a question that could be looked at in many different ways.

Category: SEO

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg