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SA Ethics debate spills into International Spotlight
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement
Inc. February 22, 2005
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An ethical SEO dust-up, which started in the South African media last Friday,
has spilled over into the international SEO media. Cape Town ISP, Tiscali
SA is defending itself after issuing a press release touting new, automated
SEO services it offers clients under the name, E-Traffic.
In the press
release, Tiscali states it uses hidden text and doorway pages,
with the goal of getting clients' websites, “right in the face of
active online consumers.”
One line of the release states, “Doorway pages are created that target
specific search engines to improve search engine rankings.” Others
contain words such as “hidden text”, making obvious implications
of keyword stuffing, duplicate content and other violations of common search
engine Terms of Service agreements.
The language used in the release outraged local SEOs from firms such as
Quirk, Incubeta and Seoza, who fear their burgeoning industry will be called
into disrepute if a major South African player starts spamming the search
engines with SEO practices considered unethical by most of the sector. Tiscali's
press statement also raised eyebrows at well known South African search
engine Ananzi with company spokeperson Mark
Buwalda being quoted as saying, “While
we encourage people to add relevant meta tags and titles to their pages
in order to get them noticed, manipulation and playing games does not help
one's clients.”
In it's defense, Tiscali has stated that the term Doorway pages might be
misunderstood. What they really meant to say was, “information pages”,
or “sub-pages”. Julie-Anne Doyle, Tiscali's head of consumer
products was quoted in the same article saying, “I think perhaps the
term ‘doorway pages' in the Tiscali context has been misunderstood,
and would be better understood if it were called ‘sub-pages'. These
sub-pages of the Web site are completely and totally part of the Web site,
describing the business and products that are being sold in a professional
and honourable way, in no way endangering search engine rankings.”
The controversy generated a lot of discussion in the past few days, so
much that Tiscali's parent company, M-Web is thinking about retracting parts
of the service. “We're still busy taking product decisions and working
out what will stay and what will go,” said Russell Dreisenstock, GM
of M-Web's South African division.
Regardless of how anyone else feels about the definition of “ethics” in
search engine marketing, this story is evidence the debate is likely to
grow in importance as the industry moves ever forward into the mainstream
world.
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