Is Seo Ethical? This is a difficult question to answer. There are many seo methods to promote a website. From the ethical point of view I have encountered 2-3 categories where the seo methods can be included:
- White Hat Seo -the techniques falling in this category assumes building unique, quality and organic content, don’t uses linking schemes that increase artificially the rank of the website and links out to other useful sites without expecting any favors in return. This type of techniques provides good and healthy rank which does not decrease in time, and is based primary on the quality and utility of the site.
- Black Hat Seo -
- This is what we can call the most Unethical Seo Techniques. Usually the techniques falling in this category consist in duplicate content, generated content to look unique, incoming links created with the help of scripts and bots in blogs comments, forums, wikis, social bookmarking sites, …
- The techniques assumes getting visitors asap before having the site banned. Sites are replicated easy using scripts to replace those getting banned.
- Usually Search engines detect most of those unethical campaigns and don’t increase the rank of the page or even worth it adds penalties for the site or even ban it. There are constant improvements done in search engines to detect black hat seo campaigns on one side and constant improvements in in black hat seo campaigns to remain undetected and unpenalized.
- Grey Hat Seo -
- Assumes building sites not necessary quality oriented, to get as many visitors as possible without applying techniques which might get the site penalized or banned.
- Content is not generated, it is unique but with a low quality and the growth of the site if targeted on adding a large number of articles, many of them redundant. Linking campaigns consist in getting any incoming link no matter from where it comes, link exchanging, …
- Most of Seo techniques falls in Gray Hat Seo category because they are abused.
In simple words White Hat consists in adding value to your site and relying mostly on quality to grow it in search engines. Black Hat is the next thing that will be detected an banned by the search engines tomorrow, but it still works today. Grey Hat consists applying safe techniques to improve the raking in search engines and not get penalties from search engines. The rank will decrease when the techniques are not applied anymore.
It’s obvious that white hat represents ethical seo and black hat unethical. The problem is how to categorize the gray one. I think any action that add value to the user is a good one and sustain a ethical seo and those which are not, don’t.
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