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Usually when you hear an SEO talk about web ethics, you think of white hat and black hat SEO. I’m sure most of you are familiar with these terms. White hat refers professional clean SEO that uses only techniques that are approved by the Search Engines and the SEO community in general. Black hat SEO refers to some of the shadier techniques that, while they may have a short term benefit, are actually dangerous in the long term. More importantly, they are misleading and wrong. Go here if you want to learn more about Black Hat SEO.

While all these things are important to understand so that you’re not unwittingly participating in any of them, I am actually thinking in terms of social media. It can be such a great tool make your business part of the online community, as we’ve discussed here, and over on the SEO blog, but what happens when someone chooses to use the social media machine for evil?

Your reputation matters online and offline:

As business people, we all know how important reputation is, right? You work hard to build and maintain a good, trustworthy reputation. It’s the essence of who you are in business. In “real life” this is a somewhat arbitrary thing. You do your best, treat people well, and work hard to be fair & honest. Most, if not all people will see your efforts, and know that you are a stand up person. Some (can’t make everyone happy all the time) will have negative comments, and even some flat out untrue things that they choose to say and repeat. This is all human nature.

People will be human:

The web is really no different. People will be people. I know some of you are not on the social media bandwagon yet. Heck, I haven’t started to use Twitter yet (I keep making some excuse about being too busy). There’s so much to this powerful new social machine, with so many ways to impact an online (and therefore offline) reputation. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, (Corey could name them all for you – I can’t even remember them all, but you get the gist) and so on create enormous opportunities to build and protect your online reputation. What I am wondering is, what is to stop someone from really damaging your reputation falsely? We’ve all seen a news story here and there, but thankfully, this doesn’t seem to be overtaking all the good things the web can do for a company.

I am guessing that some sort of code of ethics must emerge.

Join online communities and discussions for the sake of building both relationships and reputation. Plus the added benefit that you’ll likely get in touch with some old friends. Keep in mind, however, people will be people, so the discussion will not always be positive about your business, but it’s much better to be a legit part of the conversation online than it is to not even know it is going on.

Perhaps coming up with the things you just don’t do, and integrating this information into the white hat area of SEO. Things such as:

*You just don’t post false information about a person, or even a company.
*If you have a grievance with a company or website, give them the opportunity to make it right before you post negative feedback or comments.
*Don’t use a company site to settle a personal score you have with someone.

What would you add to this list? I’d be curious to hear from others that have given this some thought, as it could be a really troubling thing if you are the one trying to clear your name, or that of your company, on the web.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under General, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.