Win By Ethics

I'd say stick with your beliefs on bizops that you feel are money-shuffling or just plain crap.

That said I do find some of the claims on what is and isn't ethical for search engines ever so slightly frightening. Not because I'm doing it (I'm not), but because I'm left wondering who appointed some people as the global Internet-police of how other people design their own web sites.

Search engines are designed to sort the good out from the bad, and as technology improves they are (and will continue) getting better and better at it.

For example, since it was mentioned, keyword stuffing was already something the search engines were dealing with in sorting their results five or more years ago. I'm amazed that people are worrying about it (let alone volunteering as Internet-police for it) all these years later.

Another thing that people are forgetting is those crappy sites in the search results often didn't achieve their high rank themselves. Rather they inherited it when a domain expired, and somebody grabbed it. My gut feeling is that many of the current crap sites that you see in the search results will eventually sink, as they get recognized by search engines as now containing crap, and as their link popularity declines. (Which isn't to say new crap sites may not replace them, by inheriting link popularity from other domains that expire).

Moving back to my core point: Chapter 9 of Search Engine Positioning by Fredrick Marckini lists 12 red flags for spamdexing. None of them are "having a crappy web site". (Keyword stuffing is, but as the book is copyright 2001, it is identified as a losing strategy 4 years ago).

Chapter 38 of the same book talks about the search engine's real cardinal sin which is presenting one page to the search engine and another to users (cloaking or IP redirection). You get comments about why they don't like it and what action they'll take (the word "ban" is common) from Lycos, Excite, Hotbot, and references to similar comments from Altavista and Inktomi.

So what's my point? In my opinion.

1. It's your site, design it how YOU want.

2. As a practical matter, spamdexing and cloaking are not in my opinion the right strategy. Not because some self-appointed Internet-police tell you not to, but

(a) because it produces a site that many users may hate,

(b) because I don't think it will work - search engines already know how to ignore a lot of crap, and are getting better and better and it.

(c) Crap sites rarely get any incoming links - see below.

3. What really matters is building a site that people will link to (both for position in the search results, and for direct traffic thru the links). If you have a strategy for getting lots of sites to link to you, that helps a lot. If you don't, at least build a site that people will want to link to, and that specialist directories will list. (Which again is a reason not to build a crap site).

4. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: If you see a crap site in the total few results at a search engine, you shouldn't view that as a problem - but as an opportunity.

If you build a good site, on a similar topic, you should eventually be able to outrank them.

- Your new quality site will be recognized by search engines as such (and if not now, sooner or later as they improve their recognition of site quality), and their crappy site will be recognized for what it is.

- Your new site's link popularity should be going up (as more people link to your good site), and theirs will generally be going down (as people remove links to the crap site)