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If you ever have any questions about DP, well, now you have my email! Don't hesitate to get in touch.
Thanks!
Rob
I've also noticed that people will steal your content and do a really rubbish re-write of it, changing literally two or three words in each paragraph.
If you're going to be a content pirate, at least get creative people.
Whilst I agree that tricking algorithms is clever, as it involves manipulating an equation, I still don't know whether I'd refer to it as 'ethical'.
Interesting post.
ma·nip·u·late
To tamper with or falsify for personal gain.
<a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/manipulate" rel="nofollow">Dictionary.com - "manipulate"
Non sequitur? I think so.
@Tom - That's one that falls on the unethical side. But then, I doubt if BHs are doing this rather than generating stuff fully. Just seems like unethical whitehats stealing your content.
Anything that makes the serps less meritocratic is surely unethical?
d
But I always hated the "black hat vs white hat" debate. It always sounded to me like a bunch of BS. If it hurts clients, then it's bad - but not a "black vs white" but more of a customer service issue. I mean, no one is called Dell Computers a "black hat computer maker" and their customer service sucks. Just a marketing ploy is what it is...
In my opinion of course. Most seem to think that blackhat SEO is not unethical. That's crap. Of course your search engine spam "could" be relevant, and of course it might even be what a search user is looking for, but what about the site who is abiding the stated rules of a search engine but is at #11 for the same term that blackhat spammy site is at #10? Is it ethical in your minds that you successfully are cheating the system for that #10 when a site NOT cheating the system is #11?
sheesh; this stuff is crappy. Period.
They profit off me without asking me for my rules.
I profit off them without asking for there's.
That's the end of it.
As always slightly; you can spin with the best of them.
You have an implied agreement with Google since you want to be in their index on THEIR website. You must abide by their rules. Google isn't trying to get into YOUR website without your permission. You give them permission by not disallowing them. If you actually had the rule for Google to NOT profit off your website, it's in your own power to do that.
The old arguement that Google profits off of you is just that........real damn old. Give it up already.
You want in Google's index; You abide by their damn rules. Period. You don't want to abide by their rules? Fine then; you are a damn cheater who is cheating a competitor who does not cheat, and also cheating Google. That's what a normal human being would call:
.....Unethical.
Period.
You wrote:
"They profit off me without asking me for my rules."
They don't have to ask you as you already state through your robots.txt that it's OK for Google to profit off your site.
You don't have to ask Google for their rules either. Google shows/tells you their rules on their own website, of which YOUR site wants to profit off of. Considering your site wants to profit off of Google, and your site wants to do well in the Google search results, then you either must abide by Google's rules and be called ethical, or you don't abide by their rules, and be called unethical.
Your site and your competitor's site do not have a formal agreement either. If your competitor is abiding by the rules and you are not, you are unethical. You can't make up your own business ethics as you go. It doesn't work that way.
When you play a game of cards with friends, you all don't have a formal agreement to not cheat either. It's an implied agreement that you will NOT cheat at cards. If you do cheat in order to gain some kind of advantage, ...hmmm,.. that's called cheating, and that's unethical.
our site has been dropped by google, so i put a post on google, and got accused of blackhat seo. i have no idea what that means, and googled it, and found your blog.
is this a serious offense that i or my design team has committed that i am unaware of, and if so would anyone be able to point me to what we have actually done thats wrong, etc...
thanks!!
can you point me in the direction of the post you put on Google? I will be more than happy to take a quick look at what could be wrong. You don't seem to have a lot of back links into your site (35) so its not uncommon to see sites drop a little in a competitive market without regular links.
Give me more info and I will tell you what i can.