From the very first day when some bright webmaster realized he could appear at the top of the search engine results by repeating a search term a thousand times in invisible text at the bottom of his page, search engine optimization has been a field that forces website owners to face some ethical choices. There are clearly “right” and “wrong” ways to improve search engine performance, and the difference between the two evolves very rapidly. Here are the ethical angles to consider before you launch your own SEO campaign.

First, a matter of definitions: The most common way to refer to ethicality of SEO techniques is by the terms “white hat” and “black hat.” They refer back to the propensity of heroes and villains in western movies to wear color-coded headgear, and the alignment of the colors should be clear here. To remain ethically pure, you want to stick to white hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO offers the classic devil’s bargain: increased performance along with great potential risks.

Before you start to consider SEO as a good-and-evil struggle, though, you need to know who makes the distinction between white and black hats. This decision is entirely up to the search engines themselves. Even calling it an ethical divide is the search engines’ choice. If you would rather look at the matter in terms of harsh pragmatism, you can define the difference between white and black hat SEO by saying that the latter is punished by the search engines while the former is not.

The nature of the punishments the search engines can dole out can be a big factor in convincing you that wearing a black hat is a bad idea. While the obvious, apocalyptic scenario is seeing your site removed entirely from a search engine index, there are less extreme, more insidious punitive measures that you might not be aware of even as they are put in place. It’s quite easy for search engines to penalize your individual pages or your site as a whole for suspicious SEO. This can reduce your ranking and make a waste out of all the hard work you put into optimization.

What exactly are the tactics that draw the search engines’ ire? In general, you want to stay away from schemes that promise to improve your search engine rankings in exchange for money. Making use of such services is definitely in the gray margin between white and black hat. The search engines tend to reserve their harshest punishment for the sellers of such services; if you use them you should be prepared to see the SEO value of the links you purchase drop to zero sooner or later. Duplicate content and shady redirection are two strategies that will get you the wrong sort of search engine attention. Content duplication is especially important to look out for, as it’s easy to do it by accident.

This is just a very basic look at the difference between white hat SEO and its black-hatted cousin. If you invest a significant amount of time in optimizing your site, you’ll certainly want to keep learning about this important subject. The definitions and boundaries of ethical SEO work can be quite complex, and they’re changing all the time. Stay informed and let your common sense be your guide if you want to keep your SEO hat bright and spotless.