I don't know about you, but I found this ad (on the right) by Virtus Communications disturbing and downright offensive. It was in the print brochure for the Italian Film Festival which took place the first half of this month in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I wonder what the heck the company was thinking when they placed this ad.

I am just being prudish, or is this fascination with violence and the connection with sex totally repulsive to you too? Got any examples of this sort of offensive advertising online by traditional businesses on traditional websites (i.e. not porn sites)? Post a comment and let me know...

I just read Phil Ringnalda's blog post accusing publishing house O'Reilly of being a search engine spammer, along with all the ensuing comments (many of them critical of Phil's position). Wow, does Phil need to get off his high horse:

How horribly low have we sunk, that I'm not willing to link to O'Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won't touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.

I like what commenter hibiscusroto had to say to Phil in response:

I wonder if you'd pay for ad-free access to the O'Reilly sites? If you were in charge of the company would you still poo-poo the ads? And lastly, "punch the monkey and win a free X-Box!!!"

So where's the line in link advertising? Is it when it's off-topic? A "Punch the Monkey and Win" banner is off-topic as much as a "Cuban cigars" text link ad is, so relevancy of the ad can't be the criteria for which to judge whether the link ad is ethical or not. I think the line is here: Is the text link MISLEADING, DECEPTIVE or MISREPRESENTATIVE? Consider, for example, these cases:

1. Setting the ad's link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn't accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims "The North Face" but that isn't The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the "Discount Vacations" example in my last post.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can't see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a "View Source" on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
</noframes>
<a xhref="http://www.icrossing.com" mce_href="http://www.icrossing.com" >Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a xhref="http://sev.prnewswire.com" mce_href="http://sev.prnewswire.com" >Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>


This sort of stuff needs to be cleaned up. Otherwise unwitting ad buyers will pay the price for the website owner's past linking mistakes. Let's hope the text link ad industry steps in here with some self-regulation — some guidelines or standards or something!

A pet peeve among panelists in a recent SEO Thought Leaders Summit was the engines' opposition to the tactic of link buying. Christine Churchill had some wise words to share about link buying:

Search engines like to take the hard line and categorize things as either black or white. In some cases, they are actually grey.

Say you are an artist and have a local frame shop you like to recommend. In turn, the frame shop might give you a small referral fee for sending all your wonderful clients their way. The online version of this is a link from the artist’s website to the frame shop’s website. It makes sense. It’s good marketing. It’s good business and that is what link-building and link buying is all about.

Many times, a link is a great lead generator. Let’s take the artist and the frame shop example again. You might get tons of traffic from that artist’s shop. It is a great business link.

You might buy links for credibility. Taken to the extreme, your link from the local Chamber of Commerce could be considered link buying.

Personally, I think link buying is a perfectly legitimate practice. I don't see the difference between a banner ad and a text link ad, as long as you're not intentionally trying to game the search engines and you expect to get traffic and brand visibility from those ads appearing on the websites you are advertising on, irrespective of the SEO effect.

You can't just ask a Search Engine Optimization vendor if they are ethical. Of course they will say "yes." So if you are shopping for some SEO help, how do you screen out the baddies?

A while back I blogged about how to be objective with your SEO vendor selection, but I didn't specifically cover how to screen out the unethical ones. I will do that now.

First off, interview the vendor extensively. Get them to explain the techniques they will be using. A "yes" from them to any of the following questions is a warning sign:

• Do your techniques involve any kind of deception?
• Do you use proprietary techniques?
• Do you use doorway pages or anything similar?
• Do you do deceptive redirects?
• Have you ever had sites banned?
• Do you offer rank guarantees? (You can’t guarantee something you have no control over. The only way you can get a guaranteed rank is through pay-per-click.)
• Do you send email to prospects with whom they do not have a prior existing business relationship or permission from those prospects in advance? (If so, that's spam! Never do business with a spammer.)

During your discussions with the vendor, if they describe their SEO tactics as short-term, you might want to reconsider. SEO, when done right (i.e. when following "best practices"), has long-term sustainable impact — for years, in fact. For proof, just read this.

After you're done quizzing the vendor, talk to their clients. Ask those clients:

• Does your SEO vendor teach you how to fish, or do they always do the fishing for you?
• Have your traffic and sales gone up a lot because of the vendor? If so, do you believe the increase to be sustainable?
• How long have you worked with the vendor? How long do you plan to continue working with them? Any idea what the vendor's client churn rate is?

Then you'll need to do some of your own investigating. Check the HTML code on their clients' sites for hidden text, hidden links, and so forth. Also examine what their clients' websites are serving to the search engines. There are a couple different ways to view a website through the eyes of a search engine spider: one is through a Firefox browser extension called User Agent Switcher; the other is through the cached version of the page that was indexed by the engine, available from the Cached link in the search results. Compare and contrast the page meant for the search engines to that corresponding page off the native website as seen by a normal visitor. If the content served up to the search engines is something completely different than what is served up to visitors, then they are spamming. Things to look for when making your comparison: if the title tag is significantly different, and if keywords have been stuffed into the body copy, the meta tags, and into parts of the website to help the version that was shown to search engines rank better. Finally, search the online forums and SEO directories like SEOPros.com and SEOConsultants.com with Google for complaints about the vendor.

Got any horror stories or lessons learned to share from dealing with a less-than-stellar SEO vendor? Post a comment.

I just heard about a supposedly-reputable competitor of ours in the search engine optimization space that's charging clients recurring fees of many hundreds of dollars per month for "submission services" to major search engines. What a joke! That just goads me, that they would take unsuspecting clients for a ride like that. We haven't submitted a single site to any major search engines since 2001 or earlier. A site with good links gets found by the spiders. Period. Frankly, resubmitting sites that are already indexed isn't just unnecessary, it's asking for trouble. And charging for it to boot? Well in my mind that's unethical.