Spamming search engines is by no means an ethical activity; however, there are reports of people doing so in newsletters and SEO forums all across the world. or that it’s important to hire only “ethical SEO consultants” or “ethical search engine marketers”. This is why we should always keep sight on the underlying motivations of SEO professionals, as opposed to spam artists. This is the same in every industry, not just SEM. If the people in our industry can remember this when trying to create a SEO Business (and there are many factions trying to do this), it will go a lot smoother.

It’s not unusual that a prospective customer will approach you with a kind of “we know what’s best for us” attitude, as enacted by their SEO (mis)information. What if such kind of customer will approach you requesting a proposal for 10 doorway pages. On the other hand, they insist that you do not “mess” with their website; all they’d be interested in is to develop a series of doorway domains.

As you’re likely familiar with, such technique aims to trick search engines into finding the doorway pages, by linking them as sitemap in the homepage. Naturally, such pages serve only as bait; from the users standpoint they’re a nuisance, since it requires additional clicks to get to the actual site they wanted to see in the first place. Should you get faced with such a customer, what would you prefer: compromising your views of proper search engine optimization, or just give the customer what he thinks is better? Certainly, the creation of such pages in that way wouldn’t exactly be a violation of ethics. Besides that, you might have noticed how the customer’s website already contained varied pages with great content? Adding doorway pages would actually be unnecessary; it would be substantially more effective and ethical to merely perform minor adjustments in the current website, while focusing keywords people actually search for.

If I were in this situation, and I couldn’t persuade them how wrong, unnecessary and shortsighted their preferred technique was, I’d have to turn down the job altogether. It’s not as if it’s pleasant to let such easy money go somewhere else. If you think about it, this kind of task could be performed nearly automatically using the right software…and you’d actually be providing the buyer with something he requested specifically? True, it would be absolutely easy figuring out ways to self-justify taking that easy cash. It goes without argument that unless you don’t keep your focus on making an effective search engine optimization, you won’t be much of an SEO professional. That particular assignment would be expendable; you professional integrity would not.

You want to hold on to customers who appreciate your long-term vision for their websites, since they’ll likely be long term customers. Why worry about losing a small account, when it’ll only strengthen your professional stand and help you get to the customers that really matter. You can gaurentee it!

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