In the world of marketing it is very important to make sure you are abiding by laws and producing ethical marketing practices. If a company produces unethical or illegal marketing this can be very harmful to the company’s brand causing a poor image or even lawsuits.
One example of this is BMW and the use of doorway pages. In 2006 BMW was looking to improve its German website’s ranking through car related key words such as “used cars”. This was all fine and good, but BMW made a huge mistake on how they were boosting these keywords. BMW used doorway pages in order to inflate inbound links and increase their ranking for competitive keywords(Devaney, 2017). Doorway pages are “A page made specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content (Doorway Pages, 2021)”. These doorway pages are looked down upon as they are only created to help boost keyword ranking as the page redirects users to the home page. In this case, these doorway pages redirected users to the BMW.DE page. Google was not impressed with this and blacklisted BMW.DE and gave them a page ranking of 0. This is a huge penalty as a 0 page rank means it will not be one of the top search results.
Another example of Unethical SEO practices is the use of rank boosting links. In 2011, Overstock.com was caught using link boosting. Overstock.com was encouraging Colleges and Universities to put their links on their websites in exchange for faculty and student discounts. Google typically sees .EDU sites highly and typically they rank high for searches. So in Overstock’s eyes, these links on educational websites would help them rank for different keywords. In regards to the issue, this causes messy results and Google does not like this. Google penalized Overstock with fines, which was one of the reasons Overstock.com’s revenue dropped $1.05 Billion in 2011 (Devaney,2017).
Ethical marketing is important and beneficial as it shows the customer that your company is truthful and not trying to hide anything. Consumers want to make sure they know exactly what website they are going to, what they are looking at and that their information if they visit or purchase anything is protected. By engaging in ethical practices consumers will trust your brand and be more likely to visit your site and in the end visit your location or purchase products/services from you.
References:
Devaney, Erik. “The Biggest SEO Blunders of All Time.” Hubspot Blog, 1 Feb. 2017, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/biggest-seo-blunders
Doorway Pages. “What Is a Doorway Page? – Definition & Information.” Marketing Terms, 6 Oct. 2021, https://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/doorway_page/.
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