When looking into companies that really shot themselves in the foot when it came to being unethical with issues when using SEO/SEM the one that stood out the most to me was BMW in 2006. The company was using what they call “doorway pages” in order to gain more people to their webpage.
Few years back in 2006 BMW German website named BMW.de found itself languishing back in the search engines page results even after using better keywords. BMW now gets frustrated with its website performance where it was doing pretty bad even in the “used cars” segment and it was losing against some of the major and minor websites. The automobile company starts to artificially inflate their inbound links through the use of doorway pages in order to rank higher in the competitive keywords. It should be noted that doorway page is created only for the purpose of redirecting the unsuspecting visitors to the parent page which was BMW site main page ( Bireswar Das, 2015). Even back in 2006, Google wasn’t messing around. BMW.de was promptly blacklisted, receiving a PageRank of 0 as a consequence of the infraction (Erik Devaney, 2014).
Some when it comes to ethical and unethical practices, there are clear differences in them both. With ethical practices people or companies are following the guidelines set or following the social norms in which the standards have been set. In unethical practices people or companies go against the rules that have been set. Its actions that are very unaccepted and can come with punishment.
The benefits of being ethical is consumers trusting your company. Not having a target always on your back when you think you aren’t doing what’s right. You also don’t run a risk of being blacklisted for not following the rules set in place. Being ethical keeps your company honest and safe.
Kyle
References
Hubspot. Erik Devaney (June 19, 2014). Retrieved on February 12, 2022. The Biggest SEO Blunders of All Time. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/biggest-seo-blunders
Indiana Affiliate Programs. Bireswar Das. (May 14, 2015). Retrieved on February 12, 2022. Biggest SEO Blunders Happened With Good Intention. https://indianaffiliateprograms.com/biggest-seo-blunders-happened-with-good-intention/
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