Comments on: Microsoft Joins Google in Offering SEO Services, Is This Ethical?

By: eorganics

eorganics — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:31:01 +0000

Its good to hear that Microsoft entering in SEO.

By: SEO Web Design

SEO Web Design — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 07:33:05 +0000

Dominating the search market. But that is definitely not right because there is always a conflict of interests.

By: Bert

Bert — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:05:14 +0000

@ Jeffrey. Tons of customers until they launch their Google SEO Truly Elite software… ;-)

By: Jeffrey Henderson

Jeffrey Henderson — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:12:07 +0000

As much as I think this is highly unethical of M$ and Google I must say I really don’t care. Since when have big companies ever been limited by ethics?

The bottom line is there are tons of customers out there and if you work hard and take good care of your clients you’re business will prosper.

By: seo staff

seo staff — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:36:28 +0000

I think this will change the strategy of the older SEO companies. Microsoft entering in SEO services will make more competition to all SEO companies.

By: jeff

jeff — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 21:06:03 +0000

I think they are all crap… they want to dominate all the money in the Web.

By: john andrews

john andrews — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:01:56 +0000

I think it will be fine for Microsoft, but sub-optimal for the clients. MS can’t push the limits, so how can they be competitive for their clients?

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:40:03 +0000

This remind me of how Ticketmaster is now getting into the secondary market of ticketsales, by starting the fan to fan exchange and also offering auctions. In the long run its going to hurt the regular seo companies, unless they keep there costs high for seo & allow your normal seo firm to pickup the mom and pop seo jobs. All-in-all its just taking a big part of the pie out of any seo professionals hands.

By: Gamermk

Gamermk — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:50:35 +0000

I think its pretty obvious that this is not ethical. Expect a court case in the future forcing Google, MSN, and Yahoo to give up their respective algorithms in order to level the playing field.

By: Bert

Bert — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:44:19 +0000

These companies have possible access to people and data that no one else has, like lists of unexploited keywords for cheap PPC campaigns, cutting edge competitor info or even algo-info. Nobody knows for sure, but only the suggestion of it makes that these companies have an edge over other companies, only because they are owned by a search engine.

Even worse, I think these practices will make the work of people like Matt Cutts a lot harder. I mean, who cares about Whitehat or Blackhat practices if a Google or MSN joins the SEO business?

Maybe Performics employees use Google Blogs and domains to ‘promote’ their clients? I don’t know, but it could happen, because they are owned by Google.

Maybe Performics clients get huge discounts on PPC campaigns? I don’t know, but it could happen, because they are owned by Google.

But maybe the most important question is: why does a search engine acquire and hold on to a company doing NSO (how natural can you get ;) and PPC campaigns, knowing the conflict of interests?