What Does "Don't Be Evil" Mean?

Sometimes, with hard work and plenty of sweat equity,  you finally manage to fight and claw your way up to the top of the SERPs. As you stand back and proudly gaze upon your hard work your smile disappears when you see an upstart with an apparently absent conscience has undone it all. What do you do when some website owner decides to play dirty and ruins the time, energy and sometimes even money that you have invested?

We all hate the black hatters – you’re not alone in this. The black hatters are the ones who come in, stand on our back and our careful work and steal the spotlight and rankings we poured ourselves into earning. These are the content scraping, link buying, bottom dwelling scum that make our lives miserable. These are the ones that play by their own rules and let the vodies hit the floor without a second thought.

How do we deal with a black hatter that is ruining our work? We take comfort that black hat tactics hardly ever last for any significant amount of time. Usually the SERPs catch on fairly quick and take action. We actively watch for plagiarism – of our own work and others because it negatively impacts all of us. Sometimes community policing and pressure work the best.  We report link buying and other Webmaster Guideline violations as soon as we spot them. In short, we play hardball.

What we don’t do is stoop to their level using fire to fight fire. I’m the sort of person who always glares at the cars parked in the fire lane at the front of the store. I’m the person that gets angry at the people driving them who will get in and out faster in the pouring rain even though they have no right to be treated special. I know if I even park there for a second to grab a paper out of the machine so I don’t have to get the baby out of the car, I will be immediately issued a ticket by a cop who will show up out of nowhere. Sometimes that is just the way it works. Some people cheat and scam and get away with it – for awhile- while others cannot for a second.

That’s OK. It keeps me honest. I park where I am supposed to, stay out of the way, and don’t end up like that guy at the diner a few months ago. He had parked his truck and trailer up alongside the building instead of back away from the restaurant where there was room, and when the man at table four had a heart attack the ambulance and fire rig had to park far away due to a cheater.

Guess who got screamed at by the firemen, paramedics, police and the diner owner as well. Who was issued a citation and banned from the restaurant ever more – just escaping arrest? You guessed it – it wasn’t me, but I saw it all and it reminded me of why we don‘t cheat. We don’t just avoid cheating in the physical world, we avoid cheating in the virtual world as well because it is wrong, eventually we will get caught, and we will pay the price for it.

Same goes for staying white hat. Don’t yield to temptation looking for a quick blast of success. Don’t be evil! It will all balance out in the end. Karma is the dickens! Play by the rules and you will win in the long run – just like the patient tortoise racing the hare.