Naive by Design

My (very last-minute) contribution to this BarCampIreland will be to chair a discussion on the ethics of search engine optimisation (SEO). I propose to get a bunch of interested people together for a half hour or so to share our views on the topic and learn from each other. I’ll introduce some of the issues and arguments at the start to get people thinking and to bring everyone up to speed; so don’t worry if you’re not too familiar with the topic. This’ll be a great way for those not speaking to get involved and share your thoughts. It’ll only work if people are actually interested, though. Read on to see if these issues tickle your fancy.

So, what’s ethics got to do with SEO? Well, in a nutshell, when optimising a site to rank well on search engines, one can use techniques that fall into one of two categories: white hat techniques and black hat techniques. (There are also grey hat techniques (guess what they are?), which I’ll ignore.) White hat techniques are widely agreed to be ethically sound because they suit the user as well as the search engine and agree with the search engine’s guidelines. Black hat techniques go against these guidelines. These are said to be unethical because generally they involve tricking the search engine in some way. But, is a commercial search engine a suitable body to define what is and is not ethical with what is owned by all, the web? If black hat techniques benefit the web site owner (get them high places in search results), what’s the problem? Also, what of the conflict of interest a company like Google holds whereby it might actually be worth their while deliberately holding back their ranking algorithms so site owners are forced to pay for their sites to get listed?

All these questions and more will be posed at the discussion. Bring your hats!

Note: This may be of particular interest to those in the market for SEO work; you’ll get to know the good, the bad and the ugly of this little industry.