Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog

Some define blackhat SEO as “using unethical techniques”. Unethical my ass! Killing a child is unethical. Exploiting drawbacks in an algorithm created by those whose professional duty is to create an algorithm that can provide most relevant search results but who failed to do it can only be called unethical by the algorithm developers in order to cover up their failure. It can also be called unethical by those SEOs who are either too lazy or too shortsighted to think out of the box predefined by Google’s guidelines. On the other hand, there are things that are truly unethical that have no rela relation to SEO, black or white. Serving up porn to a child looking for cartoons is unethical. Threatening people in order to get their money is unethical. Is it because SEO is mentioned in connection with those cases? – No. If a math teacher goes and robs a bank shall we call all math teachers unethical?

Just because Google calls certain techniques it cannot effectively deal with unethical doesn’t make blackhat SEO a crime. Unlike email spam that is persecuted by law in many countries, there is no law against black hat SEO anywhere in the world. Google is not the Internet police, nor is it the Internet, no matter what their ambition is. True, it does play a huge role in today’s Internet. But Internet has started its existence long before Google, and if tomorrow there would be no Google Internet will still exist.

Furthermore, there is no way to declare blackhat SEO illegal since the line between blackhat and whitehat is very thin and vague. Where do you draw the line? The same technique can be used for a perfectly legitimate purpose as well as pure SERPs manipulation. But to SEOs, there is no excuse for ignorance. The truly unethical thing is covering your ignorance by name calling. This is unprofessional and scamming people into thinking otherwise of your professional qualities, paying you money, risking their business to your incompetence IS the real crime.