Digital Marketing Ethics by Ann Smarty

Digital Marketing Ethics have always been a controversial - sometimes touchy - subject among internet marketers. Those who work on the technical side have a tendency to demonize search engine optimization thanks to scrapers and scammers using improper methods to drive traffic. This is almost always a numbers game for them, a way of generating PPC profits and upping their ranking Google to get more without any real effort.

Of course, Digital Marketing is so much more than that. A couple of bad eggs doesn’t stop the fact that proper keyword enhancement and exploitation is a normal part of optimizing a website for the very algorithm Google has put in place. No amount of changes to that algorithm lessens the impact of SEO on search results.

In a time where so many popular marketing tactics are being demonized, it isn’t easy to say where the issue of ethics stands. On one hand, you have people like Google’s Matt Cutts claiming guest posting is dead (I vehemently disagree). Nofollow is being enforced on links, reducing the opportunities for link building to an insane degree. Paid guest posting is so rare now that little websites haven’t got much of a chance of using it to build a stronger following.

What is clear is that ethics in marketing isn’t. Black and white adherence to everything Google says is a quick way to reduce your results. That doesn’t mean you should go against their policies and guidelines, just that the matter of what is “right” is more a matter of debate than it might at first seem. Is guest posting inherently bad? Obviously not. Is using a paid guest post to manipulate readers into contributing to PPC profits shady? It could be argued that yes, it is.

This is an ever changing topic, and in this section we will cover everything to do with it.

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