SEO Code of Conduct - Search Engine Guildlines, SEOs Shall Not

In the area of Search Engine Guidelines, the SEO shall not:

• SPAM THE SEARCH ENGINES.

   

• Resubmit a site to thousands of search engines repeatedly.  Not only is this not necessary, it is also considered spam.  It also may delay natural search engine crawling of your website

   

• Attempt to manipulate indexing or enhance domain saturation by employing machine generated web pages from specialized "optimization" software applications.  Optimization software, while in and of itself is not the issue, should not be used to manipulate the search engines.  This includes continually “pinging” the search engines to make them aware of your site’s web presence, automatically created doorway or AdSense pages, garbled text in a paragraph to include keywords, and programs that embed over-optimized or repetitious keyword elements, including keyword stuffing.

   

• Falsely represent the contents of a client’s website.  This includes presenting one set of information to a visitor, and another to a search engine.  This pertains to hidden text, CSS layers, cloaking, IP delivery techniques, redirects, and hidden scripts or links.  **This does NOT include helping sites drop session IDs from URLs and using keyword-rich URL 301 redirects or scripts in order to give true URL context.  (This actually came from the horses’ mouth during the latest SES conference the first week of December.  The horses here are Yahoo, Google, and MSN.)

   

• Generate doorway pages with the sole purpose of propagation or interlinking content that is mirrored or duplicated from a separate domain.  The new term for doorway pages is “specialized landing pages”.  Beware that if these pages are stand-alone, or on another server with the intent of redirecting the visitor towards a different website, then these landing pages are nothing more than doorway pages, and this practice is strictly prohibited by search engines.

   

• Make excessive use of Search engine resources.  This includes using remote services to query the search engines.  Over use of search engine APIs or queries not only overload the search engine servers and slow down crawls, but search engines do attempt to locate the source of the problem, and ban the IP.  If this happens on an IP that your website is on, then you could be banned from the search engine index for good.

   

• Use non-compliant HTML in an effort to enhance relevancy for targeted search phrases, including the use of multiple titles.  This usually refers to using titles or descriptions that contain highly popular keywords or keyword phrases, but have nothing to do with the actual context of the page.

   

• Participate in link farms or pages featuring user added link systems, deceitful linking strategies, or other linking schemes, which include interlinking differing client websites.  Directories are being closely scrutinized as link farms, especially if these directories have no resounding theme, and link directories on a website in order to house all link requests a website gets is not considered good practice, as evidenced by the latest Google Jagger update.

This List of Guidelines

This list covers a lot of ground, but it is by far is not all inclusive, nor can it be set in stone.  Regardless, following this code of ethics will not only keep the SEO out of trouble with the search engines, it’ll keep SEOs in good graces with their clients and the community.  And while I think it’s worthwhile to mention a few suggestions for the code of ethics, I probably won’t add them to the list, such as: “Don't jump to conclusions during updates; wait for the dust to settle,”  and “Keep all sharp objects out of reach when checking ranks after an update.” These are still good little bits of advice!

An SEO’s job is to increase a client’s rankings in search engines, but it must be done ethically, morally, and naturally.  Any failure to do so is not only a bad investment on the part of a website owner, but it is truly just plain bad business as well.