Ethical Search Engine Optimisation

March 29, 2006

Some of the design department were having a discussion about ethical search engine optimisation today. The focus of the discussion was which methods are considered to white hat and which are black hat. This is an important issue for us, as we practice ethical search engine optimisation. In most cases the distinction is clear cut: deceptive optimisation techniques such as hidden text and spammed alt tags are a bad idea and could cause your site to be dropped by the search engines. There are, however, a number of grey areas.

Scrolling boxes, for example, are a perfectly ethical method for containing text. But what if the box height is too small for the text to be easily read? Is this considered to be black hat, and if so, at what point does the box become too small? Another example is the use of javascript to hide text from the spiders. To increase keyword density for selected phrases, you could display all non-beneficial text through javascript. This text would not be seen by spiders, which means that the spiders would see less text on the page, and think that your page had better densities for the keywords that are not hidden. Is this ethical?

Please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Dave Stewart
SEO Consultant