SEO defined

[massa]

After an enchanting evening, (if you know what I mean, wink-wink), my little Doogie and I were sharing a warm croissant for breakfast, (I think it's so cute the way he holds his little pinky out when he eats french pastry), and he informed me that finally, what is right and wrong in this industry has been defined. Not only morally, which has never been an issue, but now legally as well.

http://www.silverdisc.co.uk/articles/sm-law/

[St0n3y]

Interesting read. I need to chew on that a bit.

[I, Brian]

Isn't he equally arguing against search engines, though?

- eBay keyword-based PPC
- non-XHTML compliance
- spidering of sites

In fact, has Alan ever written an article viewing the legality of search engine behaviour? It would be interesting to see what his thoughts on indexing, caching, and use of DMCA are in this arena.

[PhilC]

Are there any other methods for the placement of deceptive advertisements in search results? Suppose that, instead of paying the search engine as in the above case, a search marketer deceived the search engine to achieve the exact same result - an unmerited placement (according to, as the FTC put it, "relevancy, or other objective criteria") of its listings in search results. Would this be deceptive advertising?

I got as far as that bit when I realised that it's just another rant based on personal biases, and without any foundation in reality. So I stopped reading the article, but not before a quick skim suggested to me that he was trying to make the point that deceiving the engines is deceptive advertising and, therefore, illegal.

Load of rubbish!

Organic search engine results are not advertisements. I think that just about covers it.

In case there is any disagreement (and I'm sure there is), I'll address the opposite position - that search engine results *are* advertisements...

Deceiving the advertising medium (the engines) is not deceptive advertising. Deceiving the readers would be deceptive advertising, but that's all. It means that getting a higher ranking for an on-topic page, by methods that deceive the engines, has nothing to do with deceptive advertising - however much the author wishes it has.

[seobook]

I am kinda with NFFC on the whole concept of setting ones own guidance in ones actions. there is some good stuff about letting others define your actions in this thread

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1928

[dannysullivan]

Alan's started a thread about his article, and I thought of merging that with this one. However, he goes into a lot of depth, and it makes sense to keep his at the top of that discussion. So, I'm going to close this thread and encourage anyone who wants to discuss his article to head over to the other thread, Deceptive Advertising in Search Results