What exactly is ethical search engine optimization? It is the practice of using only techniques that would not be considered shady from a search engines viewpoint. Anything that is done specifically for the search engines in order to gain an advantage over your competitors can be considered unethical. When considering implementing a new SEO strategy you will have a gut feeling about whether or not what you are doing is specifically for a search engine or whether it is to provide the best content to the right audience. It is actually similar to your conscience in that you can just tell whether it is “right” or “wrong” in a sense. If you feel like it could be viewed as being black hat it probably could be. Are there any grey areas? Of course there are but you will learn how to make those calls with experience as you work with clients and see what is successful and what does not work.

An interesting technique I have recently discovered is the scrolling div used in a manner that displays data on the source code without actually displaying the data in the browser. Is this a grey area or this just black? Probably just black but I will tell you what I am talking about so you can decide.

You can place the scrolling div with absolute positioning in the source code at the top of the page with good relevant content that is very keyword rich. You use the absolute positioning to place the actual div on the bottom of the content in the browser. If you give the scrolling div a height of 32 pixels it removes the scrollbar on the right hand side to make it invisible. Then if you space the top of the text not to start for close to 35 pixels either through padding, spacing, margins, or the skip line code the div will push the visible text into the overflow which can be accessed on the page by scrolling which should be SEO friendly. Now, the “grey” or black part… Because we gave it a height of only 32 pixels, the scrollbar isn’t visible meaning it appears that there is absolutely nothing on the page unless you put your mouse over the div and scroll with it.

Can this be picked up by a search engine? The search engines would definitely be able to read the text and it would appear to have large significance due to the placement in the source code. The tricky part is to determine whether or not a search engine is smart enough to put all the factors together and determine that the text is not visible. Can they do that? I have not specifically tried this technique yet because I try to avoid areas that can be potentially black hat but I would love to hear if anyone else has “gotten away” with this technique. Chances are you probably could but you can definitely get the sense that this is a grey area. I might be willing to try it with a personal site but not a client’s site just yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 6:45 am and is filed under Brad Henry's Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.