Code of Ethics

Search Engine Optimization industry, at best, still remains an unorganized sector. There are no formal qualifications, certifications or pre-requisite of experience to declare oneself as an “ Expert”. Anyone, who has read a few articles and forums about is tempted to start an service, sensing immense earning potential in this field.

There is no doubt that the need for good services is growing at an unprecedented pace. Sites are facing stiffer competition to get to the first page of search engine results. In the absence of formal ‘rules’ in work, the only guidelines that remain available are the ones ‘recommended’ by individual search engines themselves. Interestingly, not all search engines have the same set of rules. However, the essence of their ‘recommendation’ is to avoid the use of any technique, which attempts to ‘fool’ the algorithm of their engine.

Most search engines are primarily committed to one philosophy: to present the most relevant and unbiased (read un-tampered) search results to their users. This is the very essence of their credibility and survival and it should be so. Their search algorithms (ranking formulas) are designed to filter content that either attempts to abuse its logic or artificially inflates a website’s relevance. The thumb-rule of their recommendation is – “Do not feed us content you would not ordinarily intend to show, to your human visitors”.

Prolonged and rampant abuse of Meta tags, keyword stuffing, site code abuse, cloaking, doorway pages and use of common tricks to fool their algorithms, have forced the search engines to constantly update their algorithms in order to preserve the integrity of their results and to cut out the irrelevant clutter from their database. The search engine algorithm update is a constant process. It’s a constant battle between search engine algorithm programmers and experts who find ways to trick the search engine algorithms. Most search engines do not take such abusive practices kindly. The penalty for deploying such abusive search engine optimization practices is your site being banned permanently from their database.

Notwithstanding such recommendations, a large section of experts have bent these guidelines to get their client’s sites at the top. Most of the times, the clients themselves are unaware of which technique may hurt their site. Usually, such high results achieved by abuse of techniques are at best temporary and get filtered out in the next algorithm update. Sadly, by the time the search engines get around to penalizing a site, the expert has collected the full fee laughing all the way to their bank. Any guarantees offered by such experts usually does not cover the recourse of such an event and the client is left holding the end of the candle.

Ironically, in order to get high ranking, all these abusive techniques are not required at all. Simple and logical treatment of the site code and well-written content in the site is usually sufficient to get high ranking. As an expert, one just needs to clear the bottlenecks for the search engine crawlers and make the site content more friendly to search engines as well as human visitors. Simple and honest site optimization not only gets better results, but is also very long-lasting and difficult to beat.

We take pride in our work. Our Search Engine Optimization work is honest, ethical and harmless yet very powerful. Amongst other prudent subtleties, we follow the following self-imposed rules in our work:

We shall not knowingly violate any specifically published rules of search engines or directories. As rules and guidelines often change, we shall promptly take action to comply with the changes.

We shall not knowingly do harm to a client. We shall not deploy or continue to use any technologies, techniques or procedure that are known to result in having the client’s site penalized by search engines or directories. This includes avoiding the use of doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, keyword spam, invisible text, submission to FFA networks and spam submission to search engines.

We shall not deploy ‘cloaking’ to falsely present the content of the client site to the visitors. This includes the practice of presenting different versions of web pages to different users and search engine crawlers with the intention to direct search engine crawlers to differently optimized content pages. However, techniques may be used to present variable content to meet regional sensitivities, language and product specific needs or to meet browser compatibilities. In any case, we shall not differentiate between search engine crawlers and human visitors. In general, all requests for a specific URL shall be served identical HTML content.

We shall not knowingly mislead, harm, or offend a search engine user. We shall not mislead a search engine user by presenting information that is misleading, false, misrepresented or inaccurate. We shall not attempt to “bait and switch” the user by redirecting them to other content or pages on arrival. These include non-usage of doorway pages, bridge pages, hallway pages, redirector pages, redirector scripts, pop-under scripts or exit scripts.

We shall not knowingly violate any laws. This involves the deliberate and continued violation of brand names, copyright, trademark, or intellectual properties of competitors of the client. We shall observe and respect laws related to spamming, as they may exist at the state, federal, or international level.

We shall disclose all techniques to the client. On request of the client, we shall disclose all techniques, codes, scripts, procedures and alterations deployed in a client’s site. We shall offer to substantiate our reasons for usage of any technique to the client’s auditor or authorized representative and if required make necessary corrections without additional charge.

We shall not misrepresent our abilities, education, experience or affiliations with search engines. This includes statements related to performance history, company resources, staff number and qualifications, equipment, software, client lists. We do not claim any special relationships with search engines to get our client’s site ranked high. We do not enjoy any special relationship with search engines beyond what is generally available to any paid user on the net.

We shall not falsely represent others work as our own. We shall not claim high ranking achieved by other experts or of a site already having a high rank as our own work. We shall not replicate optimized code of the high-ranking sites of the competitors of our client and use it in our client’s site. Each of our work shall be original.

We shall not set unreasonable client expectations. We shall not extend unreasonable guarantees or performance to win contracts. Guarantees will be restricted to items over which we have significant and reasonable control.

We shall not conceal a potential conflict of interest amongst clients of the same industry. We shall not conceal the work done previously for a similar industry client. We shall not discriminate or emphasize the work for one client over the other for competing keywords or deployment of techniques for more personal gain. All clients shall be treated equally and all will receive equal best effort in their site optimization.

We shall offer our clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures. This includes the publishing of our contact address and phone numbers on our website and inclusion of third-party dispute resolution links.

We shall protect the confidential and privileged information of our client. Our staff and we are committed to protect any privileged or confidential information accessible to us during and after the project that is not generally known to public as it may harm the client. We shall not publish the client site or their testimonials without intimation to them.

We shall not undertake optimization of offending sites. We shall not promote sites, which promote pornography, nudity, adult content, racist content, anti-government, anti-religious, anti-social, illegal businesses or any type of business that conflicts our policies.