A moral dilemma

[dasmon777]

It is my belief that SEO and Online marketing are hard work but the more you put in the more you will eventually get out.

Those clients of mine that use me for their marketing to obtain good organic positions have been very happy regardless of the amount of hard work they and I have had to put in to get them there.

Now I feel I have been wasting my time.

One of my clients drew my attention to a small web company locally that makes all of my hard work look redundant and worthless.

I have reported them to google over a month ago but their PR is the same and nothing has happened.

SO maybe I am wrong!

their site is

oasthousemedia.co.uk

Is their marketing technique acceptable?

I work with the google and yahoo guidelines in a book beside me everyday and they intimate that this form of marketing is punishable. Yet the site is still there and their clients are benefitting from their position.

Morally I don't want to go down this route, but my clients must come first - so maybe I should do the same thing and have worthless keyword links that go to copies of pages or worse nowhere.

I don't know what to do for the best now.

Do I go for the ethical route or the effective route?

[crankydave]

Not exactly sure what the issue is.

First off, a blank page can have toolbar PR. So what's on the page isn't important in that respect.

Secondly, how exactly are their clients "benefitting"? I'm not sure what it is you're seeing that you're calling "effective" and why.

Dave

[kevsta]

lol. I take it you didnt scroll very far down the index page Dave?

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by kevsta

lol. I take it you didnt scroll very far down the index page Dave?

I saw what was on the page.

What's on the page isn't going to affect TBPR. My questions remain the same. Who is getting what "benefit", for what, and what exactly is "effective"?

Dave

[claybutler]

Nothing wrong with what they are doing. Just a lot of keyword rich hyperlinks. Aesthetically not pretty but it works. This is a very valid and effective technique. I use it all the time in various degrees.

They are linking to there own pages as well as linking to clients pages that in turn link back to them. It's bit overboard but it's really just a hyped up version of a "site designed by" link and a "portfolio of clients list". Plus they put it below fold so you don't really have to look at if you don't want.

[jameshills]

I am not sure where they are really breaking the rules, except for aesthetics, it looks nasty and probably they are reducing link juice by having so many links and such an incredibly spammy site all around.

The only thing I could see being bad is if they are selling those links, or possibly the other sites for their services just being doorway pages to get local listings. Possibly unethical, but not illegal.

On the flip side, you gave them a bunch of PR (publicity) by promoting this.

If all you are doing is just setting up one link on a moderately well ranking site, with virtually no real organic value in traffic generation then you should feel threatened, but if you develop a network of on-topic links from a variety of sites that is designed to bring targeted traffic as well as "link juice" I think you'll be ok

Cheers,

James

[marcel]

Your competitor's SEO technique is old and outdated... Why don't you concentrate on using the latest and best SEO techniques ?

[Orion]

wow very spammy...

honestly though, I can't see that they are really benefiting form this in anyway ...

maybe they have a great ranking in the SEs BUT as a potential client would you really want YOUR business's website to look so unprofessional and spammy? Would you want a company that looks like that representing your company? Doubt it.

In the long run their approach will not be of huge benefit. If they were ONLy selling SEO and not design people may not look beyond the fact they rank well, but as a print and web design company that site can't do them much good.

my 2cents anyway..

[kcire]

I will have to agree with Orion here.

This is maybe nice at first...But in the end people want quality and it looks like this website only has a quality for 'keyword placement'...The rest looks just horrible.

For example I found 302 errors when checking it with the W3C validation service.

And do you think it looks nice?

[kimber23]

that title tag is just luscious. i wanna lick it!

[billmarshall]

Is it benefiting them? I doubt it. They are keyword stuffing to such an extent that they are bound to be diluting any relevance to any particular keyword phrase. PR4 (even if you can trust toolbar PR which you can't, and it's only updated about once every 4 months) is hardly stellar and doesn't tell you anything about relevance.

Is it benefiting their clients? Well there are 486 links on that page so any link strength they might be transferring is divided by that figure, (quite apart from any dilution for a lack of relevance) so that doesn't seem like much benefit to me.

Keep to your ethical stance. If you ever link to a client it will have far more benefit for them than any link from your competitor's page.

cheers

[iowarth]

Well, I Googled for "website design uk". If their technique was half as good as you believe they would be well up the results table. In practice they weren't in the first 5 pages ..... and that's enough for me! As for Page Rank, well, my own site has a value of 5 - and that is very old, very out of date and very old fashioned. But the content is good and the inbound and outbound links are good - and in a similar search it made Page 4. (and no, I'm not worried - I'm semi-retired and just build the odd site for friends and charities nowadays for fun!). So - stick to well-founded SEO techniques - content first and foremost and leave them to play silly b*****s!
Chris

[iowarth]

Whoops - correction - I Googled "website design kent" which should have pinned them right down!

[ron angel]

Originally Posted by dasmon777

It is my belief that SEO and Online marketing are hard work but the more you put in the more you will eventually get out.

Those clients of mine that use me for their marketing to obtain good organic positions have been very happy regardless of the amount of hard work they and I have had to put in to get them there.

Now I feel I have been wasting my time.

One of my clients drew my attention to a small web company locally that makes all of my hard work look redundant and worthless.

I have reported them to google over a month ago but their PR is the same and nothing has happened.

SO maybe I am wrong!

their site is

oasthousemedia.co.uk

Is their marketing technique acceptable?

I work with the google and yahoo guidelines in a book beside me everyday and they intimate that this form of marketing is punishable. Yet the site is still there and their clients are benefitting from their position.

Morally I don't want to go down this route, but my clients must come first - so maybe I should do the same thing and have worthless keyword links that go to copies of pages or worse nowhere.

I don't know what to do for the best now.

Do I go for the ethical route or the effective route?

I quite like what they have done promoting all of their clients without any black hat technique its also the perfect page for a spammer to get loads of company info from to send junk mail.
maybe if somebody tells them about this forum they will link here as well!

[crankydave]

Actually, in revisiting this thread, the dilemma I see is a professional one.

The ability to confidently and accurately address a clients concerns/questions when this kind of thing comes up. Because as long as there are folks putting this kind of crap up they'll most assuradly be concerns/questions that come from clients.

This is precisely why I asked the questions that I did.

Dave

[dasmon777]

Thank you


I will endeavour to continue using sound techniques as recommended by the SE's, but it is a little disconcerting to see these types of techniques so successfully undermining what i feel should be good content + good user friendly site = rewards and decent placement.

[jesussaddle]

I have to admit, the beneft of having links from clients to ones main page is plausible. It does look a little spammy, but...it may be worth it purely from the point of view of greed.

BTW, Marcel, what were you referring to in terms of there being more modern techniques?