You may have noticed that SEO Secrets of the PageRank Masters has moved to a new domain: WhiteHatCrew.com. The more I see of the internet marketing world, the more I see of both ethical and unethical techniques. I'm a strong believer in ethical behavior, and have tried to practice and promote ethics in an industry where there's ample opportunity to slip over to the dark side. I created White Hat Crew in order to place greater emphasis on the ethical issues involved in internet marketing.

The extra bump that inspired the creation of White Hat Crew came from my recent limited participation on a link exchange site. For many of you, the mere mention of a link exchange site may raise a red flag. So it is for me. But I realized that as long as the link exchange program allows me complete control of who I exchange links with (unlike systems that automatically generate links on your site without your approval), then a link exchange site can be a good place to hook up with related websites and forge appropriate linking relationships.

So I signed up and requested exchanges between my online chess site and a few other chess-related sites. I also signed up my RSS & Atom feed directory, though I didn't immediately request any exchanges. I soon started receiving a number of link exchange requests, many if not most of which were from completely unrelated sites. So I updated my information to state that I only exchanged links with related sites and found a way to block requests from unrelated sites. But I didn't set the filter very strictly, and I continued to get requests from unrelated sites. So I tightened my filters. Things may be under control now.

Still, there's the issue that the related sites that send requests to me are also exchanging links with unrelated sites. So my links aren't necessarily being put into a resource directory related to my site, but just onto pages containing at best a loosely categorized list of links. And there's the question of the quality of the sites participating in the link exchanges. Are we helping the search engines by creating directories of quality resources, or fooling them by creating lists of links to any old junk?

After a little bit of that experience, it occurred to me to create a link exchange system that put heavy emphasis on link exchange ethics--ie. building links pages that are targeted as much at humans as they are at search engines. I may add such a feature to White Hat Crew at some point. Until then, I hope that it will be useful in promoting a high standard of ethics as it acts as the hub for my writings on various aspects of internet marketing.