Ethical Search Engine Optimization
SEO ethics has become an important topic throughout the web-marketing industry over the last few years, especially as unethical practices have become commonplace (BMW, Yahoo, and even Google have been implicated in these unethical practices). The question over what makes an SEO firm "ethical", though, must go well beyond what methods it employs on behalf of their clients.
In our day-to-day activities as SEO's, we often come upon solutions that could improve the search experience. While we have an obligation to our clients when these solutions affect publishers, an ethical SEO also has an obligation when these solutions can positively impact search from the user-end. At Virante, we take that approach to heart.
We believe that ethical seo is more than simply following Google's guidelines and Better Business Bureau recommendations, it is making a positive impact on the search industry and search experience as a whole.
Virante has made significant investment into projects that do just this. Two of our flagship projects are LinkSleeve and PoundPrivacy. These two projects have given Virante the opportunity to improve the search experience for all web users and also target the very unethical SEO activities which most "ethical SEOs" simply avoid.
About LinkSleeve: http://www.linksleeve.org
Link spam is a growing concern across the web. Essentially, it is promotional grafitti which endangers the health of the interactive online communites - blogs, guestbooks, forums, wikis, and anything else that relays user generated content. LinkSleeve is a unique XML-RPC implementation that allows websites to filter spam based on the spam received by users across the web. It is a powerful tool that has already stopped tens of thousands of spam messages. It is free, platform-independent, and can be integrated with almost any online application.
About PoundPrivacy: http://www.poundprivacy.org
The AOL Data Leak made all too real the privacy implications of using search engines. For some reason, the search engines rely solely on their privacy policy, programmers, and legal teams to handle their user's private information and have not empowered search users to protect their own privacy. The PoundPrivacy campaign creates the first web standard for search privacy, empowering search users to opt-out of data tracking by simply typing the phrase #privacy.
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