Can white hat search engine optimization efforts be looked at as spam? I'll try to define what I think "White Hat Content Spamming" is. White hat content spamming is the creation of pages that are constructed to do well in the search engines. They do not deploy methods of screen scraping other pages for content, they do not conduct link spam methods to rank those pages high and they do not do any form of page hi-jacking. But what they do deploy is the use of highly content rich pages, focused around one to three keyword phrases.
In a post by Marcia at SEW Forums named Confessions of a White Hat Content Spammer: What I've Learned by Ignoring Google, she goes through her examples of what led her to where she is today. In her mind, she is a "white hat content spammer".
The questions Marcia asks at the end of her post were thought provoking, to say the least.
Are white hat content spammers in any way stealing from other webmasters, just because they know how to do it, or concentrate their efforts on doing it? Are they/those among us "spamming the engines", or just listening to the advice they give us to create pages relevant to users?How *do* we decide what's despicable and what's just plain old spam, or what's ethically acceptable? Are white hat content spammers sinners or saints? Are they/we gaming the engines, or just doing what they advise us to do by creating "relevant" sites and pages?
In which Jill Whalen responds to as; "It can't be. It won't ever be....It's not."
To me, I think its more about the purpose behind those white hat optimized pages then the tactics deployed to achieve top results.
