Aaron Wall of SEO Book on Ethical SEO
April 19th, 2005 by Shanti BrafordAaron Wall of SEO Book tackles Ethical SEO in this article.
A quote (from an email he received):
I think when people talk about ethics in business they are concerned about someone cutting into their profits or threatening their profits. It has nothing to do with human rights or suffering (which is wrong). Either way, business people will continue to talk about ethics all day - even while they own sweat shops - because sweat shops have very little to do with ethics.
Definitely worth a read. I like Aaron’s contrarian thinking.
Just to extend the line of reasoning from the article (so that we’re all on the same page), these are a few statements of fact that can also be made:
- Hitler was ethical
- Killing babies is ethical
- Genocide is ethical
- Comment Spam, Email Spam, DNS Hijacking, Stealth Spyware Installation, etc etc is all very very ethical
Why? Because (just going off this article) ethics is a tautology defined by you. Whatever you say is ethical, is, well, ethical. Or to quote Mr. Wall:
The people who push the ethics concept, are by default, ethical.
This was my favorite quote from the article:
Search engine spam is not the same as email spam or blog comment spam as you are not directly immediately wasting some persons time.
I love that: “directly immediately”
I’m actually not finding fault here, just picking apart the words…
So… is it okay if I’m only indirectly immediately wasting someone’s time. Or what if I’m directly, but not immediately wasting someone’s time?
Aaron - here’s all we (speaking for anyone with a weblog and comments turned on) are asking:
Do you, Aaron Wall, think that using blog comment spam (as a technique) is unethical?
That is, from your own code of ethics that you wake up with, make money with, live and breath, everyday.
If not, I think people should start linking to you with the phrase: ethical comment spammer
…as a joke 
Update: Aaron responds -
>ethical comment spammer
I actually have not done anything like that in a while. feel free to link up though
Glad to see Aaron hasn’t gone to the dark side of SEO.
Shanti Braford wrote this on April 19th, 2005 and filed it under SEO Blogs, SEO Consultants, SEO Updates |
April 19th, 2005 at 11:51 am
>ethical comment spammer
I actually have not done anything like that in a while. feel free to link up though
>directly immediately
words used could have been better. but the point was the job of the engine is to find good stuff. if they promote lousy stuff that is there bad.
will there be some deception? in any competitive market you can bet there will be. but sorting through that is the job of a search engine.
April 22nd, 2005 at 1:54 pm
From Aaron’s reply (I actually have not done anything like that in a while)…the keyword is “a while” :))
May 10th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Yeah, hehe