"Ethical methods" of SEO follow the search engines' guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable.
"Unethical" SEO methods - methods and tactics not approved by search engines to gain better ranking.
Jobshout optimizes pages using ethical techniques only. Some SEOs argue that the terms ethical and unethical should not be applied to the work they do. They maintain that on the principle of basic freedom everybody should be free to post whatever rubbish they choose on a site they own, as long as they stay within the law.
The responsibility to block search engines access to that content is not one the webmaster should automatically assume. SEOs then explain that typically search engines visit sites uninvited and help themselves to the entire content of that site. Should the search engine then apply some software to "digest" that content and use it in their search results (often monetized with their own advertising) then pinning an "unethical" label on the webmaster is neither fair nor accurate.
The flip side is that when a webmaster submits a site to a search engine he is actually inviting the search engine over. However, nowadays, the invitation is unnecessary as search engine spiders are aggressive in finding links to new pages and in crawling that new content, often within hours or minutes, unless they have specifically been excluded by a webmaster-prepared robots.txt file, or a robots exclusion meta tag.
Further reading…
Unethical SEO methods
