Ethical SEO (also known as white hat SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website in a way that is compatible with the guidelines defined by the search engines themselves.

We use Google’s guidelines as an example, because to all intents and purposes Google is by far (+90%) the most widely used search engine in the world.

In simple terms, there is an ideological divide between those who work in SEO:

White hat SEOs, or Ethical SEOs, believe that the best way to get results in the medium / long term.
Black hat SEOs (a bit like pirates) believe that it’s possible to circumvent search engine rules (including those that entail serious penalties, such as banning a site from search results altogether) and get results in the short term.

Of course, many black hat SEOs do think it’s possible to circumvent and bypass Google’s rules in order to improve the positioning of their clients’ sites, and many even succeed. Until one day….

Famous websites that have been penalized by Google due to black hat SEO:

The Washington Post – in 2007, The Washington Post was caught red-handed selling links on its blog, without adhering to Google’s practices regarding paid links (placing link as rel=nofollow). The newspaper’s PageRank fell from PR7 to PR5 and was only restored after a few months.

BBC – in 2013, the BBC was penalized for unnatural links on a single page, although the details have not been confirmed. The fact is that this page suffered a penalty and dropped a lot in Google’s rankings.
BMW – in 2006, BMW was caught manipulating search results for the term “used cars”, then redirecting users to the company’s normal page. The result? The site was completely removed from search results for three days.
Google Chrome – this one is hilarious but 100% true. In 2012, the Google Chrome team was caught buying backlinks to promote their own browser. Google’s quality team had no choice but to lower the rankings of their own product…

Google has strict policies in place to combat spam and ensure that the search results presented to users are of a high quality.

These policies were created to prevent spammy sites and content from getting high rankings in search results and thus serve to protect users from scams and other deceptive practices that have taken place over the years.

Here are some of the practices that are “prohibited” under Google’s search quality rules:

Spam and deceptive practices:

Google has implemented a series of measures to detect (algorithms that perform quality audits) and thus penalize sites that engage in these activities. This includes algorithms designed to identify and downgrade spammy sites / pages and even manual actions carried out by human evaluators from the search quality teams.

Link schemes: Google’s algorithms highly value backlinks (links pointing from one site to another) as a sign of a site’s quality and relevance. However, there are also policies in place to prevent sites from manipulating their rankings through link schemes, such as buying or selling links, or participating in link schemes that violate Google’s guidelines.

Unnatural links: Google’s algorithms are designed to identify and penalize websites that have unnatural or artificial links pointing to them. This includes links created solely for the purpose of manipulating search rankings or that are not related to the site’s content. Examples of this are PBNs (private blogging networks) and Link Farms.

User-generated spam (UGS): Google also takes action against user-generated spam, such as spam comments or forum posts, as well as sites that allow user-generated spam to proliferate.

In general, Google has robust policies to combat spam and protect the quality of its search results. Sites that violate these policies run the risk of being demoted or removed from search results, so it is important that webmasters follow these guidelines to ensure that their sites rank well in Google search.

It is important to mention that it is always possible to recover from a Google penalty, even from a manual penalty by a quality editor. Still, the effort to do so varies and it can be days, weeks, months or even years before that penalty is completely removed.

Recently John Mueller from Google’s search quality team referred to SEO specialists’ “magical” attempts and approaches to building backlinks based on schema and generally poor link quality. The answer is clear:

“if you build the foundation of your site on top of bad links for a long period of time, it will have a long effect even if you suddenly decide to improve some things”

john mu bad links foundation

By now there should be little doubt about the effects of doing bad SEO.

Back to Ethical SEO:

By now there should be little doubt about the effects of doing bad SEO.

Back to Ethical SEO:

Now that we’ve identified the parties and understood what can happen to those who “misbehave”, let’s talk about some of the things that are included in the work of an ethical SEO technician:

Doing keyword studies, conversion potentials and the effort required to position in those searches;
Study and develop relevant, high-quality content on the website or application;
Use titles, headings and descriptions rich in descriptive keywords (beware of exaggeration), to improve the site’s visibility;
Ensure that the site has a clear and intuitive navigation structure;
Use techniques such as alt text to describe images and make the site more accessible to people with disabilities (and even to search engines that can’t read images);
Dealing with technical issues as wide-ranging as http to https redirects, canonicals or hreflangs;
Much more…

Ethical SEO helps ensure that a site (in reality Google looks at pages, not sites) is visible to search engines in a fair and legitimate way.

In contrast, “black hat” SEO involves using unethical or manipulative techniques to try to improve a site’s ranking, which can result in the site being penalized or banned from search engines.

Reasons why you should prefer ethical SEO over black hat SEO:

Ethical SEO is more sustainable in the long term:

Black hat SEO techniques can help a site rank higher in the short term, but are often detected by search engines and can result in the site being penalized or banned. In contrast, ethical SEO techniques are more likely to produce lasting results that don’t risk penalties.

Ethical SEO is better for the user experience:

Black hat SEO techniques often result in a poor user experience, with sites that are harder to navigate or full of low-quality content or spam. Ethical SEO, on the other hand, focuses on the user.

Ethical SEO is better for your site’s reputation:

Using black hat SEO techniques can damage your site’s reputation, as it can be seen to be employing unethical or manipulative tactics, with effects even on the company’s own reputation…

In contrast, ethical SEO helps build trust and credibility with both search engines and, more importantly, human beings!

Do you still have any doubts about the type of SEO you should opt for?

Sources

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies