Does blackhat automatically mean unethical?

Can't believe it's not blackhatAs a general rule, blackhat SEO is NOT in and of itself unethical. Sure it tries to manipulate search engine algorithms, but that doesn’t violate any fundamental guidelines of human behaviour. But blackhat practices CAN be unethical.

(Image provided by Stephen T of http://www.locatetv.com/ )

The ethical line is drawn where blackhat SEO significantly and negatively affects humans, and not just some abstract mathematical system.

(I say significantly to avoid people extrapolating that bad user experience is unethical.)

Here are a few instances – hardly comprehensive – where blackhats’ spam is lacking in ethics.
1) Parasite hosting. Pay for your own hosting.
2) Wasting other people’s time because they’re busy moderating your junk comments/submissions etc. This also applies to disrupting the normal functioning of communities by creating massive amounts of spam threads, stories etc.
3) Cracking someone else’s site: you’re using property that doesn’t belong to you.
4) Related to #4, cracking sites in such a way that causes their SERP CTR to drop. E.g. by getting their site labelled as dangerous.
5) Referrer spamming to deliver trojans/viruses/affiliate cookies (e.g. cookie stuffing) to webmasters who you expect will check out their referring sites.
6) Google-bowling a competitor by linkspamming their domain and/or DDOS attacking them and/or cracking their site to have it deliver trojan installers.
7) Stealing other people’s content and republishing it without permission.

At the same time, there are some instances where blackhat SEO is ethical. These typically just take advantage of the limitations of automated ranking systems (search engine algorithms) without troubling humans.
1) Autogenerating content with a Markov Chain or madlib system or other technique.
2) Linkspamming abandoned sites that the owner no longer spends any time on. Of course, this is different than linkspamming someone to the point where they choose to abandon their site…
3) Cloaking your content to rank higher (read:stuffing the cloaked content with keywords; not showing bicycles to SEs and pills to humans, since you’re again stealing humans’ time).
4) Using link farms, doorway pages and/or any other tactics which have no significant negative impact on humans. Doorway pages are kind of borderline since they require an extra click, but I put that more in the category of “crap usability that will kill your conversions” rather than unethical stuff.

Guest blog posts coming soon

I have been really slack with the blog over the last week or two, its mainly been through the amount of stuff i am trying to get through both at work and at home. To try and combat this i am opening up the blog to some guest posters, the first post will follow tomorrow and will be by Gab Goldenberg of SeoRoi. Gab is well known and well respected in the world of SEO and his posts will be about the ethics of blackhat.

My other guest blogger (who we will see next week) is a chap called Sean Mauger who runs an equestrian clothing website. Even though he is not as well known as Gab he certainly has a good head on his shoulders and will be taking more of a marketing look at the industry as opposed to my random thoughts or more technical posts.

Hopefully we can continue this in the future so the blog gets a bit more diversity, if your reading this and feel you might be interested in blogging or have something to add then just pop me an email using dean@chewie.co.uk.

I will be getting back to normal with the blogging in about a week so hopefully posts wont be so far apart in the future.

Orange want you to search for ‘I am’

… And then don’t naturally rank for it…. durr!

You have probably seen the adverts on TV, some guy decided to ride a bike around the world to break the world record, and tells us how he is the woman that knocked him off his bike, and he is his mother who gave him all the courage to do it etc etc. At the end of the commercial Orange tell you to search for ‘i am’ online, in the hopes that you will then click through there site… except your probably part of the 60.5% who wont. Why you ask? Well because of this…

As you can see, Orange take up err NONE of the natural search results, and have a little tiny PPC ad at the top, just under the Google Search Bar. This seems quite strange that you would launch an entire campaign and then not even naturally rank for the term anywhere at all.

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Facebook stalking made easier

Since using the new version of Facebook i have noticed that they are still rolling a few things out here and there, and also tweaking a few bits. I must admit that i am loving the new style so much better than the old one, and yes there are a ton more options too. My only worry is for application developers whose boxes are now cast out to a completely different page on a users profile, but that’s another post for the future.

So instead of me just banging on about nothing i’ll get to the point of this post. I was playing around with the News Feed Preferences section of Facebook and i noticed (i am sure it wasn’t there before) that you can now add individuals that you want to see more or less off.

I think this is a pretty awesome idea for two reasons. 1) Unlike the rest of the worlds freaks, when i split up with a girl i don’t really want to know anything about what she is up to (what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you), and i also don’t want to remove her as a friend as i always do the whole “still want to be friends thing”. So what better way to shield a broken heart than by adding her to the “see less of this person list”.

Now you can obviously flip that round and do a bit of auto stalking, which brings me to number 2). Can’t be bothered to keep refreshing your victims (err potential lovers) page to see if they have finally gotten out of that relationship with the guy who is not only better looking than you, but also actually knows how to approach women? Then all you do is whack the relationship status bar up and type her name into the “show more of this person” box and your good to go. All the info you need right on your feed page.

So there you go, in true Chewie fashion i got bored halfway through writting this so i come to a quick close. I was looking for this function a while back and glad its finally here, i’ll let you decide for which reason 🙂

Update: I have written a newer blog post which identifies that these news preferences no longer work