Is SEO Immoral?

Recently, Rand Fishkin, over at SEOmoz published a great piece about a very interesting question that was recently posed to him: Is SEO immoral? That is, in some people’s estimation, SEO is a way to game the system, to hack Google into thinking that your site is better than someone else’s. Thus, people who hire an SEO services firm are trying to trick everyone into thinking they have the content you are looking for. However, Fishkin points out that this is patently untrue:

SEO, like any form of influence humans can have on one another, can be used for good or evil. The great part about SEO, in particular, is that using it to promote irrelevant results is, generally speaking, a fool’s errand.

He points out that most people are smart enough to realize when a site has used black-hat SEO tactics. For example, if you search for “PPC management,” and a site comes up called “Credit Card Debt-B-Gone,” most people know to avoid it. Basically, SEO is only useful when it is used to enhance a website so that it can reach the people who are looking for it. As such, it’s not good or evil, just another tool (much like marketing) to help people find what they are looking for. To add to the question of does Google have a “moral obligation” to delist sites that just create bad content? Absolutely not. Google has no moral obligation. The only obligation they have is to their shareholders. To produce the best return for shareholders money they simply have to produce the best search results. If Google keeps that up the other questions are mute.