Ethical SEO - Why the emphasis on 'Ethical'?

At Kingpin, we’re proud that all of our SEO techniques fall under the banner of ‘ethical’ practice. We want to give your clients every single opportunity to get ahead, but we refuse to engage in what is known as ‘black hat’ tactics – SEO tactics that abuse the system and can often lead to being entirely banned from Google and other major search engines.

So what exactly IS ethical SEO? Different SEO companies have a different definition or even a ‘code of conduct’ detailing their own guidelines.

Our mantra is simple. Rather than trying to trick a search engine into believing we are providing unique high quality content by skirting around their accepted practice and rules, we simply provide real high quality content that doesn’t need tricks and policy violations to make it successful.

Whilst black hat SEO might not be ‘illegal’ using such techniques mean that you risk severe penalties from the search engines. You might see a small short term boost in traffic, but what will you do when Google bans your site from all searches?

Even if you manage to avoid being banned by Google, there’s your companies reputation to think about. Most black hat techniques come dangerously close to what many people regard as ‘spam’: do you really want your company to be associated with such methods?

Here a few examples of poor, unethical or ‘black hat’ SEO:

Hidden Text and Links – Writing hidden text onto a page that users can’t see but search engines can isn’t often used anymore, but it’s one of the most basic and easily detected methods of black hat SEO.

Non Original (Duplicate) Content – Copying content wholesale is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, and one that’s easily recognised by search engines that will quickly penalise your site.

Article Spinning and ‘content generators’ – Producing large amount of content from a single article or set of articles might not be violating the terms and conditions of most search engines, but it’s a very weak strategy that relies on quantity rather than quality, and traffic gained from these ‘articles’ is often entirely irrelevant.

Invalid Descriptions – Not only do search engines get annoyed by fake or invalid descriptions of your products and services: any potential customers will also be totally turned off such transparent techniques.

Ethical SEO requires a lot more planning but is a hugely effective long term marketing strategy for any online business, be that small or multinational. It not only builds up your traffic and results in higher quality links but it protects your company’s online reputation at the same time.

For information in how we apply our Ethical SEO techniques in practice, take a look at our press release page which has information about how we create our content.