There’s nothing ethical about spamming search engines; all the while, there are several companies doing so throughout the world, as reported in relevant forums and newsletters. There’s also much information concerning the importance of only outsourcing for search engine optimization professionals who use ethical strategies. This is why we should always keep sight on the underlying motivations of SEO professionals, as opposed to spam artists. This is true in every industry, not just SEO. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEM Company (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.
Prospective clients are known to sometimes bear an unhealthy stance towards search engine optimization, as result of information they’ve read somewhere else. What if such kind of customer will approach you requesting a proposal for 10 doorway pages. Even as they make such request, they insist that you do not mess with their actual site; they’re just interested in manipulating search results through strategies involving “fringe” websites.
This kind of doorway pages is bound to get easily catalogued in search engines, provided you wrap them neatly, via sitemap linked down below in the homepage of the actual site. 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. Should you get faced with such a customer, what would you prefer: compromising your views of proper search engine optimization, or just give the customer what he thinks is better? Truth of the matter, building the pages that way wouldn’t be exactly disreputable. On the other hand, what if there was already plenty of good content in the actual website? Once it gets down to it, the creation of those doorway pages would be nothing but a waste time; what the customer really needs is something much simpler: the optimization of the current content with appropriate search keywords.
Whenever dealing with this kind of customers, I always try to persuade them how wrong, pointless and ineffective their chosen strategy would be. Should I fail in doing so, I won’t hesitate to turn down the client. Obviously it’s not pleasant to turn down such easy money. I mean, not only could you effortlessly generate those pages using software…but you’d actually be giving what he’d ask for, correct? It wouldn’t take a stretch of imagination to figure out several ways you could convince yourself it would be okay to take that easy money. But the bottom line is that it’s your job as a professional SEO to do what you know in your heart is right. If keeping your reputation requires turning down an easy job, it’s all for the best.
If you keep perspective on your career, you’ll notice that losing this kind of customers is actually irrelevant. Turning down that type of work may get you feeling at loss, but you’ll actually be making an investment in your reputation. Take my word!
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This post was written by plrpro on October 23, 2008
