The other day Seth Godin talked a bit about “astroturfing” and the efforts of some people on the web to campaign against it. What is astroturfing? Basically, faking grassroots enthusiasm for a product, politician, website, and so on.

It just made me wonder, isn’t a whole lot of “SEO” or search engine optimization really just some form of astroturfing? At the obvious end of the spectrum you have blog comment spam, link farms, and other attempts to boost the supposed “popularity” of a site. In the big picture, it seems like most forms of SEO are some attempt to fake out the search engines and convince them that your site is indeed the site they want to seek out when they are looking for X.

Seth mentions that doing this can erode whatever trust you had in the first place and that is a bad thing.

But then again, if you don’t do any efforts to promote, how will anyone find you in the first place? It is great to be trusted, but if you are only trusted by your mom, your dog, and your best friend, that is not likely to be that viable as a business proposition. As the saying goes, any press is good press, and I think many people believe that on the net.

The bigger picture is, how can you tell when one is “faking enthusiasm”? Do you track ip addresses? Have digital watchdog’s out there outing companies or causes? It is obvious to tell for comment spam, but who really looks at that outside of other search engine optimizers? The web is a very big place and the factors which cause a website to have “trust” in the search engine’s eyes are often fairly unknown to the average user. The web too easily allows anonymity on all sides and it is not always clear who the “agent” is when actions are taken online.

It also seems it is something that would be easy to fake if a competitor was out to sabotage you. In the same way that SEO’s can help rank a domain that says “companyXsucks” if this sort of “outing” of astroturfing was encouraged it might lead to people employing more mechanisms to leave fake comment spam and other efforts to tarnish the reputation of their competitor.

In principle I agree it is a bad thing and not a viable strategy to risk user/consumer trust, but in practice I think it would be quite difficult to really point out where it was occuring and who was engineering it.