by John Tourloukis, 6/13/2006

There are various techniques of Search Engine Optimization. Broadly, these are referred to as White Hat, Black Hat and Grey Hat.

According to various definitions available, ethical SEO would be:

• a technique that does more good than harm
• one that keeps in mind the dignity and rights of all involved
• one that treats all parties involved fairly
• looks out for the overall benefit of all concerned
• enhances the participant experience in all aspects

But why is this needed? Why should there be ethics defined for something like searching on the Internet? Given the fact that this is an ever-growing area of revenue and traffic generation, the interest in best practices is increasing. And just as well, the ethics that are being discussed and adopted widely are not restricted to the big corporate search engines. In fact, they apply more to those who are optimizing their pages so that they will show up on these engines' results.

People using a search engine expect to find accurate results when they search. But usage of underhanded (Black hat or Grey hat) techniques, may return a page that does not have the relevant information. This counts as bad user experience and the search engine stands to lose out in its audience. Moreover, a web page that does have the information being searched by a user also loses out. Over a period of time, if there are too few people linking to a misrepresented link, its ranking will fall anyways, but not before it has done some damage to the user's experience.

One of the most unethical practices is deception of a search engine. This can be achieved by keyword stuffing where only keywords relating to a particular topic are placed on an HTML page. By doing so, the search engine bots index and rank the page but when someone visits it, they find only a list of keywords or content that is not relevant to their search.

Another technique that is often implemented and has been universally termed as Black hat is the practice of hidden text. By putting keywords or text into a web page with the same color as that of the page background (e.g., white text on a white page), search bots will pick up the page as containing 'x' content. In reality, though, the content may be entirely different from what the keywords claim it to be.