I engaged in an intersting blog comment exchange last night with some people from the USA, where the blog owner had started to scrutinise techniques used by SEO companies on his own patch (namely Denver). Something didn’t sit quite right with this for me.
Now I don’t engage in, or condone, Black Hat SEO Techniques, although from time to time I will admit that I have slipped into the grey area in between (but what SEO is actually whiter than white?) However, running down your competition in order to make yourself look good – that’s just wrong and unethical in a business sense.
If I found an local SEO company that was engaging in black hat techniques I would contact them directly, question their methods and wait for their response. After all, every tale has two sides and everyone deserves their right to comment. Directly posting on a public forum is not a professional way to do it, although maybe this is a sign of the behaviour of people raised in the Internet Generation.
I’ve found that the best road to business success is to work with companies, not become known as a ‘sneak’ who goes round whistle blowing their competition at every given opportunity.
So my question is, would you publically hang a company for its techniques, or engage in a dialog with the company to question their methods and integrity?
