In the event this is your first college course anywhere ever, there are two things I’d like to convey on behalf of students everywhere: Welcome! And, Ethical Considerations are a big deal! Put that little nugget of wisdom in your pocket; I’m giving you pearls here.

Speaking of unethical, the worlds of SEO and SEM are, let’s say, competitive. I’ve owned a flailing digital marketing company for five years now and, not to toot my own horn, sometimes I wonder if I’m the only guy in the field who has taken a college course. But of course SEO is competitive: I have yet to come across a single prospect or client who said, “Nah, I don’t really care if I’m on the first page of Google. Here, just have some money.” 

So what do we do, and what do we know? We know a made-up word like “algorithm” gets tossed around a lot. We don’t really understand what that means because, duh, it’s made up, but then we hear about things like “backlinks” and “keywords”, and this is the stuff we can really latch on to. And some marketers, when they sink their teeth in something, are not unlike your average pit bull. But before we continue, you should understand the definition of Black Hat SEO, which briefly stated is “practices that are used to increase a site or page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines' terms of service” (WordSteam, n.d.). In other words, these are ethical no-no’s. 

Your digital marketing firm just killed J.C. Penney

Can you imagine the celebrations you might have if you landed J.C. Penney? I sure can’t. But I would feel a need to perform, to really deliver outstanding results. That’s exactly what SearchDex did, well. Maybe too well. J.C. Penney was on top of the search world for a while, and it didn’t really matter what you searched for. But it turns out “someone” “probably” paid to set up a couple thousand links to J.C. Penney pages, making them look natural and organic. The result? In about half an hour Google took the company from a number one listing down to a place that was meaningless, and SearchDex got fired. They may not have even gotten past the hors d'oeuvres (Segal, 2011). 

When Google gave itself a spanking

If you like to complain about Google and, who doesn’t, at least you can concede the company isn’t one of those authority figures that says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” You see, Google has punished itself, more than once in fact. Take for example a two month period in 2012, when the company penalized the Chrome homepage for buying links to it, something against its own policy. The result, searching for “Google Chrome” during that period didn’t give, you know, Google Chrome the top listing (Sullivan, 2014).

The right way and wrong way to do SEO and SEM

Most people inherently know the difference between right and wrong. Even dogs know. Take mine, for example. When I come home there are two possibilities: one, she’s at the door, excited and waiting for me, and, two, she’s nowhere to be seen. The latter is a signal she’s been bad, and if I’m stupid enough to walk through the house I will find a mess of some sort. She’s hiding from me because she knows she’s been bad, and that means she knows she’s going to hear my stern voice, which she doesn’t like. 

A digital marketer isn’t very different. We know what’s right, and if we don’t, Google gives us clear guidelines to follow. But the client wants results, and the client is paying the bills. In a sense, the distinction mirrors that of successful SEO and paid content in general: I might be able to get results faster by buying links, promising something I can’t deliver, or hiding content, but long-term that’s going to bite me, and of course get me fired. 

Thus the benefits of being an ethical beacon in the digital marketing space are simple to understand. First, I’ll be able to sleep at night. Second, I’ll have an opportunity to build long-term success and a positive reputation. Besides, to paraphrase Bocephus, I’m pretty sure if I choose to fight the law, the law will win.

References

Google Search Central. (2020). Overview of Guidelines. Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/overview 

Segal, D. (2011, February 12). The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all& 

Sullivan, D. (2014, February 12). 5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules. Retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/google-penalized-breaking-seo-rules-184098 

MrsFrankIero. (2007, August 19). Urban Dictionary: bocephus. Retrieved from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bocephus