Linkbaiting Ethics Thoughts
There has been lots being debated about ethics in SEM, and I do mean all of SEM. We have all gotten the question “so what do you do?” and tried to explain to no avail. People always resort to the “oh, you’re one of them???” And I spend the next 10 minutes explaining that I do not spam, make pop-ups, or otherwise annoy the hell out of people.
With a recent piece of link bait it went further: there was a debate about whether Google should be anyone’s mother. This was brought up because Matt Cutts, the lead of the webspam team at Google, noted that he was disappointed in what I assume is a friend for saying that she supported the link baiter and his tactics. Everyone got up in arms and the big debate started. These are my thoughts
Point 1: Matt has said numerous times that he is not Google. He works for them, but he is not the entire company. Sometimes what he says is just him. I have got to get on a soapbox for a minute … The man deserves a life. Let him just voice his PERSONAL opinion without it being “Google’s” opinion. Tons of people started saying “Google said” when in fact Matt said it.
Point 2: What I understand as Matt’s point on Sphinn (where he was asked what Google thought, not what he thought) is that Google doesn’t want to trick people. And that is just what this story did. Was it the writer’s fault? Not entirely, it was written as a satire and people picked it up as truth. But was it misleading, yes.
Point 3: I don’t think there is anyway Google can “find” things like that algorithmically, but I think it was a scare tactic. Do we as an industry want everyone trying this? Making up stories to see if they stick? Not really.
Point 4: The idea behind making up a story to get links is a bad one. It worked REALLY well for this person, but let’s not get people to duplicate it. Google’s mission, Matt’s mission, and a personal belief of mine is that we should do things for the good of everyone. I always understood link bait to be cool stories, features, things that made people go “wow.” But never something deceiving. If you want to use a satire as link bait, cool, but label as so.
Point 5: Did this hurt anyone this time? No. Was it kinda funny? Hell yeah. But give the idea the right power and the right people talking about it, people will start to use it as a tactic. Then you have something that can hurt the ENTIRE industry. Who is going to trust any of us then?
