Profession Decisions regarding SEO Ethics

There’s a relatively hazy line between search engine optimization and spamming; according to information posted across the Internet on forums and newsletters, certain companies purposely use shady techniques to achieve better rankings. Many people also alert towards the importance of dealing with ethical consultants and marketers. If you value your websites reputation, you should always work with legitimate SEO professionals, rather than spam artists who’ll end up hurting your reputation. This is true in all industrys, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEO Business (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.

So, how about customers who approach you with a corrupted mindset from reading somewhere else about search engine exploitations. What would you do if one such misinformed customer asked for something like a set of 10 entry domains liking their website. Since they suppose getting a network of pages linking their site from the “fringes”, they also insist you leave the site itself untouched.

Such doorway pages would be easily found by search engines since you’d group them with a sitemap and get it discreetly linked somewhere down below the actual homepage. Such pages are grouped together to lure search engines, but they provide real users with nothing but disservice: once they get to one of the doorway pages, they have to make an extra click to get to the actual site. In such a scenario, what should you decide: indulging the customer’s request, or take a stand concerning your favored views of website optimization? Once you think about it, the creation of such pages wouldn’t be regarded as dishonest. But what if you’d notice there was a actually a good amount of content pages in the site? Rather than satisfying the customer’s whim and provide him a futile service, it would be better to merely optimize the current pages in his website to match the keywords people typed in search engines.

If you ever get faced with this kind of situation and you really can’t talk sense into the customer, trust me: it will be better to just let him go. Sure, it’d be good money for an easy job, so it may sound like a bad decision for some. After all, you could actually generate those pages automatically using software...the client would likely be happy he’d get what he wanted? Innumerable arguments you could raise, while convincing yourself there would be nothing wrong with taking such a job. If you expect to be regarded as professional SEO, you should always keep your eyes set on doing effective optimization. You shouldn’t regret about losing such a client, because he’ll hardly help your career progression.

You should keep your best efforts for buyers who will welcome your expertise. When you have to turn down intransigent customers who don’t value your expertise, you should think of that as an investment in your future. Look at the bigger picture!