Module Six: For this blog assignment, research at least one real-life case in which poor ethical or illegal practices in SEO and SEM impacted a specific brand negatively or led to a lawsuit. Then review Ethical SEO vs. Unethical SEO.

An example of a real-life case in which poor ethical or illegal practices in SEO and SEM impacted a specific brand negatively, or led to a lawsuit, is in the case of overstock.com in 2011. Overstock offered discounts on their merchandise to college and university students and faculty in exchange for those colleges and universities embedding links on their sites. Because websites that have the “.edu” designation have more authority with Google, these additional links allowed Overstock.com to rank more highly for targeted keywords. Once Google found out, they imposed penalties on Overstock.com that ended up costing the company $1.05 billion in revenue. (Devaney, 2017)

In your blog assignment, address the following:

• What are some ways that organizations engage in unethical SEO/SEM tactics? Provide examples from the case you found.
  • Artificially padding links to rank higher than deserved
  • Content Automation
  • Doorway Pages
  • Hidden Text or Links
  • Keyword Stuffing
  • Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
  • Sneaky Redirects
  • Cloaking
  • Link Schemes
  • Guest Posting Networks
  • Link Manipulation (including buying links)
  • Article Spinning
  • Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
  • Rich Snippet Markup Spam
  • Automated Queries to Google
  • Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
  • Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
    (wordstream, n.d.)
• Make a clear distinction between ethical and unethical practices.
  • The distinction between ethical and unethical practices is that “white hat” ethical practices are without any hidden tactics to trick search engines for higher ranking. Unethical practices, known as “black hat”, are practices that are used to artificially inflate ranking results using secretive techniques (Optimus 01, n.d.)
• What are the benefits of being ethical?
  • The benefits of being ethical are that you attract more stable, natural, and high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert. Another benefit is avoiding any potential penalities. (Wilbanks, 2023)

References

Devaney, E. (2017, February 1). The biggest SEO blunders of all time. HubSpot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/biggest-seo-blunders

Optimus 01 . (n.d.). Ethical Seo vs. unethical seo | optimus01 online. https://optimus01.co.za/ethical-seo-vs-unethical-seo/

Wilbanks, N. (2023, January 26). Ethical seo: Understanding white-hat strategies. Bizop Media. https://bizop.media/article/white-hat-seo/

wordstream. (n.d.). What is Black Hat Seo? – wordstream. wordstream.com. https://www.wordstream.com/black-hat-seo