"Keyword Rich" Pages and Ethics

I just received a newsletter with the below paragraph in it in an article discussing doorway pages vs. "keyword rich pages" which the author argues can replace engine-specific doorway pages, but work similar in that they are not intended for visitors who come via the homepage, but rather only as a means of getting higher rankings. I've not been a supporter of doorway pages or these, but I wanted to get people's thoughts with regard to SEO ethics. My stance is that this seems to be a "sketchy" idea at best, and I am not really in support of this...

"What you should do is to provide a link to these KRPs from the home page of your site. You don't want people who are seeing the home page to actually follow these links to the KRPs - you only want the search engines to follow these links. However, you can't create links with hidden text (i.e. text with the same color as the background color) in your page since the search engines will almost certainly penalize or even ban you for doing this."

In my opinion it is at least gray hat SEO. I wouldn't do it, but then again I wear a bleached white hat. Others may think it is ok. One must remember that ethics are situational and a matter of opinion.

anytime you are creating content you dont want people to see then it is complete garbage in my opinion.

of course yahoo likes paid inclusion, but other than that most search engines would look down upon creating artificial pages you do not want visitors to see.

the issue has nothing to do with ethics though.

I'd argue that everything has something to do with ethics. However, I was thinking more of SEO ethics - i.e. Black Hat / White Hat.

If a person fills the internet up with crap machine generated pages it is greedy and on that angle since they are excessively wasting other people's time it would be not ethical since we can't get our time back.

Ethical has nothing to do with search engine optimization. I and Google owe each other nothing. How can we tie ethics into a computer program?

If I am using pay per click advertising that is ethical because search engines would profit. If I list in the organic listings it may or may not be ethical. It's those organic listings that support the search volume that sells those ads.

I can list at the top of organic listings by getting a bunch of people to link to me naturally, being excessively keyword dense, renting off topic links, or buying advertising from related sites.

To pick and chose what is ethical based on where the money is going (that is where the whole black vs white thing came from) is bogus. Businesses need to operate efficiently. If pay per click ads are the most efficient form of advertising, or if they are profitable then great...the business should do it. Some business models would not work on a cost per click basis. For those business to survive they need to get good rankings and lots of traffic from other sites. As long as they have providing the user with a good experience and on topic pages (smart marketing does this) then I don't see how they could be deemed as "unethical" just because the owner of a search script said so.

Mind you I don't normally do most of the stuff people call "black hat" but the label is garbage in any and all ways.

Business ethics and working hard for the customer are entirely different then agreeing with the exact policies of a script that can change any way it choses any day or night.

Basically I am saying that "SEO ethics" is the equivalent of feeling guilty for eating a banana because you harmed something that is living.

If you disagree with the term so much why is there a link to a site in your profile that essentially outlines one's opinion of black hat seo and criticizes it via parody?

Regarding ethics - I should have more aptly named this thread .... SEO ethics or perhaps subbed the White Hat/Black Hat terminology in there. In this sense I am referring to whether or not the above technique is acceptable or unacceptable within the confines of generally accepted "good" SEO practices. By no means should this "ethics" term be taken as the generic term - it must be applied within the context of generally accepted SEO practices. In this sense it is very much like ethics in that this cannot be any more clearly defined - I was simply looking for people's opinion of whether or not they think this is "okay". No right or wrong answers here.

don't do it. search engine friendly means user friendly. If you try to fool search engines your sites will be penalized sooner or later.

Yes I'm in agreement that this is a poor strategy. I was surprised to have seen it in a fairly popular newsletter...