Most SEO discussions about “spam” focus on the search engines - what you can get away with vs. how likely you are to get “banned”. In the case of those people trying to market using social networking sites this discussion shifts slightly to “How can I get lots of links on these sites without getting caught (and frozen out)?”

For instance, I belong to a video uploading service where it has been recommended that the same video be uploaded to the same site with some minor changes in order to multiply exposure, backlinks, etc. The suggestion is that certain things about the video be changed for each upload - the title, the tags, the description, the encoded format - but not the actual content of the video itself.

Others in other contexts have suggested that the openness and current Google-love towards social bookmarking sites can be exploited by opening several accounts and bookmarking the same sites in each account. The discussion as to the appropriateness of these practices is always “Can I get away with it?”, “Will I get banned?” This is similar to a discussion about the morality of stealing or murder focusing on whether or not we will get caught. But anybody who has ever thought about “good” and “bad” knows that there are other, “deeper” reasons why we should not condone things like lying, stealing, murder, fraud, etc.

This also goes for spam. Spam is not bad because we can’t get away with it. It is bad because it is deceptive and attempts to misuse our trust relationship with the site owner. Spammers are essentially cheaters. They are breaking the rules that the rest of us have agreed upon. And in bending the rules or pretending to obey them they are intentionally being deceitful.

For instance, if I say to someone, “You can leave comments on my blog as long as they are on topic and have some substance,” a person who simply ignores this rule and leaves off-topic, insubstantial comments is misusing the privilege I have extended to him.

I could care less what Google thinks of this. It is ME he has done a disservice to.

So it is not about what works as much as it is about the “contract” between the user and the site owner. If the video site owner makes it clear that videos are supposed to be original, then submitting the same video in a different format is breaking the contract.

Of course you can say that doesn’t matter because Google (so far) hasn’t found a way to monitor this type of abuse. But, as I ‘ve said, that misses the more important point: you are breaking your agreement with the site owner.

Wouldn’t it be better to actually submit “different” videos - videos with slightly different content? So when creating a video, create four or five different versions of it by changing a few things around, changing the title slides, changing some text around….

Yes, this would probably take more time. But wouldn’t that be the ethically correct thing to do?