SEO
Ethical Marketing: Definition, Principles, & Examples
Ethical marketing is tricky to talk about. How do you even begin to define it, given the very concept of ethics varies from person to person?
To broaden my initial understanding of the topic, I:
- Spoke with three marketers whose marketing efforts are guided by their ethics.
- Polled marketers on both Ahrefs’ and my personal Twitter account.
- Trawled websites and other resources.
As a caveat, this guide is by no means exhaustive nor perfect.
My aim is to help you better understand what ethical marketing encompasses, what it means to different marketers, and how you might consider incorporating it into your business.
In this article, we’ll cover these:
Ethical marketing is an extension of ethics—which is defined as a system of moral principles.
Put simply, ethical marketing is when you promote a product, service, or brand in a way that aligns with your values and morals. This can mean not making inflated claims, as well as practicing full transparency and openness. Your actions depend on what you define as ethical.
The principles of ethical marketing depend on, well, your principles. When polled on Twitter, here’s what Ahrefs followers and marketers had to say:
Ethical Marketing to me:
– Not belittling your competitors (name-shaming) to get customers
– Not lying to a potential customer about what your product can do.
– Not running ads on your competitors’ brand names.— Afeez Adebayo (@za_icon) April 12, 2022
Ethical marketing for me is about:
✅ Seeing customers as humans
✅ Not trying to bait them into buying/trying something they don’t want
✅ Not exaggerating on the value proposition
✅ Not making up things that are not realIn short, not marketing for blind conversions.
— Anmol Ratan Sachdeva (@arsachdeva) April 12, 2022
Every marketer (every person infact) knows what’s the right thing to do in a given situation- that thin line between what’s right and what’s beyond. Ethical marketing to me is staying true to that feeling.
— Jubin Mehta (@jub_in) April 13, 2022
Following these polls, I spoke with three marketers in the SEO space whose ethics shape their marketing efforts. These were their thoughts:
Maria Soleil, Soleil Marketing
Maria Soleil founded boutique agency Soleil Marketing to help purpose-driven brands create a positive social and environmental impact. For instance, she’s shaping the marketing strategy for social enterprise Etrify—a climate tech-focused startup that helps businesses track and report their carbon emissions.
For me, the principles of ethical marketing include being responsible, honest and transparent in promotional activities, prioritizing data privacy, not engaging in pressure tactics, avoiding using UX dark patterns, using inclusive language, and more.
Ethical marketing is also about using suppliers, partners, and platforms that align with your morals and values. For example, I no longer use Meta to promote my business, and am exploring how to help my clients be less reliant on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Alice Karolina, The Ethical Move
Alice Karolina is the founder of The Ethical Move (TEM), a movement built on three commitments:
- To put the person before the sale
- To communicate inclusively, truthfully, and clearly
- To take responsibility for TEM’s part in changing the marketplace
For instance, TEM aims to provide the resources and space for like-minded marketers to congregate through its upcoming community, The Ethical Move Community. This will play host to events, summits, and roundtables.
TEM also maintains a Medium page that discusses manipulation in marketing to help readers better understand ethical marketing. You’d do well checking out its newsletters too. Each edition features a marketer’s pledge to ethical marketing and why they’re choosing to be a part of the movement.
The core principle of ethical marketing is how we do it. Ethical marketing is a matter of collective learning and unlearning over time. Changing tactics is just the beginning; challenging our core beliefs and really listening to our audience is the juicy stuff.
Jamie Indigo, DeepCrawl
Jamie Indigo is a senior technical SEO analyst at DeepCrawl. She previously penned a piece on ethical SEO for Search Engine Journal.
As a brand, ethical marketing can come in the form of transparency and fairness in hiring, salary, and safety.
Is it ethical to ask candidates to do hours of free labor for an opportunity to work for you? Once someone has interacted with your campaign, website, or converted, how does your business store that data? If you’re buying data, how was it obtained?
These questions are thought exercises that allow us to see the common thread. Ethical marketing is a lens to view our marketing tactics and consider if we’re treating users as humans, first and foremost.
The difference between ethical marketing and sustainable marketing is that sustainable marketing promotes environmental and socially responsible values. Ethical marketing promotes the brand’s values and morals.
For that reason, sustainable marketing is a subset of ethical marketing because it’s an example of a brand value.
So if the brand cares about sustainability and practices that in its marketing, it’s engaging in both ethical and sustainable marketing. This is because sustainability is one of its brand values.
Here’s an example of what it may look like:
As Alice shared with us: “Ethical marketing and sustainable marketing can be symbiotic and thrive when used together. They are both rooted in how the company perceives responsibility.”
For instance, Singapore-based shoe brand anothersole describes itself as a business that wants to do social good by building sustainable communities. It’s also transparent in how its profits are split:
Ethical marketing comes with a slew of benefits, including a clear conscience and transparency among customers—which breeds trust.
From an SEO perspective, you may also stand to benefit through (free!) positive publicity, which may come in the form of backlinks and media mentions.
We’ll touch on the latter point shortly. For now, let’s take a closer look at some real-life examples of businesses that use ethical marketing and how that has benefited them.
Earlier, we framed the definition of ethical marketing as two key things:
- Being honest (not making inflated claims)
- Practicing full transparency and openness
In the following examples, we’ll look at how each of these businesses fulfills the above criteria.
Apple
Tech major Apple is not without its flaws: For all its environmental efforts and focus on transparency, it has got just as much flak for some of its opaque practices. Still, we thought to include it solely for its commitment to sustainability.
Let’s start by looking at its dedicated page on ethics and compliance:


Its business conduct policy is the same and framed around Apple’s guiding principles of honesty, respect, confidentiality, and compliance.


In this blog post, we’ll hone in on Apple’s emphasis on honesty—which most closely reflects what ethical marketing is about, i.e., transparency and open communication.
Let’s take a look at its Environment page. Here, you’ll see specific examples of how its products are made sustainably, complete with clean copy and explainer graphics.


While we can’t verify the authenticity of Apple’s claims on how its phones are made or recycled, the tech brand is widely trusted—and its transparency in this regard only adds to its credibility.
Here’s a look at the number of backlinks and referring domains to Apple’s Environment page for the words “apple sustainability” (via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer).


We’ll be honest: Ethical marketing can sometimes serve as good PR, especially if your business is doing something unique (and practicing what it preaches). Over time, you may even acquire quality backlinks, boosting your website’s authority and positive sentiments surrounding your brand.
Ahrefs
At Ahrefs, ethical marketing is put into practice quite differently from Apple—and that’s why we decided to include ourselves in this list.
Here’s what it looks like:
Telling it like it is
We show exactly how our toolset can help you achieve certain goals through blog posts, YouTube videos, quick product update videos, and more.
Take this video on link building tools, in which we recommended the likes of Google Search, Ahrefs, Hunter.io, NeverBounce, Pitchbox, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o5te5lt0w
The tl;dr is that we never oversell the utility of our toolset. Instead, we educate users on how to complement their use of Ahrefs with other tools.
Maintaining user privacy
We’ve spoken about this at length before, and we’ll say it again: Ahrefs doesn’t use cookies or tracking unless absolutely necessary. We also avoid retargeting campaigns in our marketing efforts simply because we don’t believe in it—which goes back to our business’s ethics.
It’s also why we’re in the midst of building an alternative search engine: to reward content creators through a transparent 90/10 profit model.
Giving back
Ethical marketing also happens when a business gives back and explains how exactly it plans to do so.
In a show of support for Ukraine, Ahrefs’ founder, Dmytro Gerasymenko, made the call to launch a donation-matching initiative, which was displayed on users’ dashboards for several months. For any amount a customer donated to an approved charity in Ukraine, we extended their subscription for double of that.
This resonated with many subscribers and won us organic mentions on platforms like Twitter, as well as media mentions—even though it certainly hadn’t been the aim of our donation-matching campaign.
That’s how empathetic businesses inspire empathy!
Praying for peace across all borders!@ahrefs#supportukraine #ukraine #ahrefs #empatheticbusiness #seopeople pic.twitter.com/XDFtKz8iRi— Amruta Nadar (@NadarAmruta) February 28, 2022
Patagonia
Outdoor clothing label Patagonia’s mission statement is simple:
We’re in business to save our home planet.
It sounds like a sweeping statement, but the brand walks the talk by acting on its four core values.
While these values seem to be shaped primarily around sustainable marketing, let’s not forget the latter is a type of ethical marketing. An example of Patagonia’s focus on transparency and open communication can be seen in its Black Friday 2021 ad:


The brand ran the ad in The New York Times, gave an announcement explaining its stance on consumerism, and informed customers that all Black Friday sales proceeds would be donated to grassroots organizations working in local communities.


Did its move stir people and get them talking? By golly, yes. It’s worked on us. Consider the fact that what you’re reading now has earned Patagonia a quality backlink.
The business even has a self-imposed Earth tax: It dedicates 1% of its profits to nonprofit environmental organizations.
These efforts are widely cited too—just take a look at its backlink profile in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.


Closing thoughts
Having dissected what ethical marketing is and what its underlying principles are, it’s my hope you’ve gleaned some useful takeaways you can apply to your business.
Have any further thoughts—or maybe a bone to pick? Shout me on Twitter.
SEO
Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Mozilla published the results of a recent third-party security audit of its VPN services as part of it’s commitment to user privacy and security. The survey revealed security issues which were presented to Mozilla to be addressed with fixes to ensure user privacy and security.
Many search marketers use VPNs during the course of their business especially when using a Wi-Fi connection in order to protect sensitive data, so the trustworthiness of a VNP is essential.
Mozilla VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that hides (encrypts) a user’s Internet traffic so that no third party (like an ISP) can snoop and see what sites a user is visiting.
VPNs also add a layer of security from malicious activities such as session hijacking which can give an attacker full access to the websites a user is visiting.
There is a high expectation from users that the VPN will protect their privacy when they are browsing on the Internet.
Mozilla thus employs the services of a third party to conduct a security audit to make sure their VPN is thoroughly locked down.
Security Risks Discovered
The audit revealed vulnerabilities of medium or higher severity, ranging from Denial of Service (DoS). risks to keychain access leaks (related to encryption) and the lack of access controls.
Cure53, the third party security firm, discovered and addressed several risks. Among the issues were potential VPN leaks to the vulnerability of a rogue extension that disabled the VPN.
The scope of the audit encompassed the following products:
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for macOS
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Linux
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Windows
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for iOS
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Androi
These are the risks identified by the security audit:
- FVP-03-003: DoS via serialized intent
- FVP-03-008: Keychain access level leaks WG private key to iCloud
- VP-03-010: VPN leak via captive portal detection
- FVP-03-011: Lack of local TCP server access controls
- FVP-03-012: Rogue extension can disable VPN using mozillavpnnp (High)
The rogue extension issue was rated as high severity. Each risk was subsequently addressed by Mozilla.
Mozilla presented the results of the security audit as part of their commitment to transparency and to maintain the trust and security of their users. Conducting a third party security audit is a best practice for a VPN provider that helps assure that the VPN is trustworthy and reliable.
Read Mozilla’s announcement:
Mozilla VPN Security Audit 2023
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Meilun
SEO
Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website.
For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign:
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results.
How to do link outreach
Link outreach is a four-step process:
1. Find prospects
No matter how amazing your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you’re contacting. This makes finding the right person to contact equally as important as crafting a great email.
Who to reach out to depends on your link building strategy. Here’s a table summarizing who you should find for the following link building tactics:
As a quick example, here’s how you would find sites likely to accept your guest posts:
- Go to Content Explorer
- Enter a related topic and change the dropdown to “In title”
- Filter for English results
- Filter for results with 500+ words
- Go to the “Websites” tab


This shows you the websites getting the most search traffic to content about your target topic.
From here, you’d want to look at the Authors column to prioritize sites with multiple authors, as this suggests that they may accept guest posts.


If you want to learn how to find prospects for different link building tactics, I recommend reading the resource below.
2. Find their contact details
Once you’ve curated a list of people to reach out to, you’ll need to find their contact information.
Typically, this is their email address. The easiest way to find this is to use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io. All you need to do is enter the first name, last name, and domain of your target prospect. Hunter will find their email for you:


To prevent tearing your hair from searching for hundreds of emails one-by-one, most email lookup tools allow you to upload a CSV list of names and domains. Hunter also has a Google Sheets add-on to make this even easier.


3. Send a personalized pitch
Knowing who to reach out to is half the battle won. The next ‘battle’ to win is actually getting the person to care.
Think about it. For someone to link to you, the following things need to happen:
- They must read your email
- They must be convinced to check out your content
- They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks (log in to their CMS, find the link, etc.)
- They must link to you or swap out links
That’s a lot of steps. Most people don’t care enough to do this. That’s why there’s more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email (I’ll cover this in the next section).
For now, let’s look at how to craft an amazing email. To do that, you need to answer three questions:
- Why should they open your email? — The subject line needs to capture attention in a busy inbox.
- Why should they read your email? — The body needs to be short and hook the reader in.
- Why should they link to you? — Your pitch needs to be compelling: What’s in it for them and why is your content link-worthy?
For example, here’s how we wrote our outreach email based on the three questions:


Here’s another outreach email we wrote, this time for a campaign building links to our content marketing statistics post:


4. Follow up, once
People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. They might have missed your email or read it and forgot.
Solve this by sending a short polite follow-up.


One is good enough. There’s no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails hoping for a different outcome. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested.
Link outreach tips
In theory, link outreach is simply finding the right person and asking them for a link. But there is more to it than that. I’ll explore some additional tips to help improve your outreach.
Don’t over-personalize
Some SEOs swear by the sniper approach to link outreach. That is: Each email is 100% customized to the person you are targeting.
But our experience taught us that over-personalization isn’t better. We ran link-building campaigns that sent hyper-personalized emails and got no results.
It makes logical sense: Most people just don’t do favors for strangers. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it does—but rarely will your amazing, hyper-personalized pitch change someone’s mind.
So, don’t spend all your time tweaking your email just to eke out minute gains.
Avoid common templates
My first reaction seeing this email is to delete it:


Why? Because it’s a template I’ve seen many times in my inbox. And so have many others.
Another reason: Not only did he reference a post I wrote six years ago, it was a guest post, i.e., I do not have control over the site. This shows why finding the right prospects is important. He even got my name wrong.
Templates do work, but bad ones don’t. You can’t expect to copy-paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success.
A better approach is to use the scoped shotgun approach: use a template but with dynamic variables.


You can do this with tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream.
This can help achieve a decent level of personalization so your email isn’t spammy. But it doesn’t spend all your time writing customized emails for every prospect.
Send lots of emails
When we polled 800+ people on X and LinkedIn about their link outreach results, the average conversion rate was only 1-5%.


This is why you need to send more emails. If you run the numbers, it just makes sense:
- 100 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 1 link
- 1,000 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 10 links
I’m not saying to spam everyone. But if you want more high-quality links, you need to reach out to more high-quality prospects.
Build a brand
A few years ago, we published a link building case study:
- 515 outreach emails
- 17.55% reply rate
- 5.75% conversion rate
Pretty good results! Except the top comments were about how we only succeeded because of our brand:


It’s true; we acknowledge it. But I think the takeaway here isn’t that we should repeat the experiment with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEOs should be focused on building a brand.
We’re all humans—we rely on heuristics to make judgments. In this case, it’s branding. If your brand is recognizable, it solves the “stranger” problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link.
The question then: How do you build a brand?
I’d like to quote our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo here:
What is a strong brand if not a consistent output of high-quality work that people enjoy? Ahrefs’ content team has been publishing top-notch content for quite a few years on our blog and YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, we were able to reach tens of millions of people and instill the idea that “Ahrefs’ content = quality content”—which now clearly works to our advantage.
Ahrefs was once unknown, too. So, don’t be disheartened if no one is willing to link to you today. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Trust the process and create incredible content. Show it to people. You’ll build your brand and reputation that way.
Build relationships with people in your industry
Outreach starts before you even ask for a link.
Think about it: People don’t do favors for strangers but they will for friends. If you want to build and maintain relationships in the industry, way before you start any link outreach campaigns.
Don’t just rely on emails either. Direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and X, phone calls—they all work. For example, Patrick Stox, our Product Advisor, used to have a list of contacts he regularly reached out to. He’d hop on calls and even send fruit baskets.
Create systems and automations
In its most fundamental form, link outreach is really about finding more people and sending more emails.
Doing this well is all about building systems and automations.
We have a few videos on how to build a team and a link-building system, so I recommend that you check them out.
Final thoughts
Good link outreach is indistinguishable from good business development.
In business development, your chances of success will increase if you:
- Pitch the right partners
- Have a strong brand
- Have prior relationships with them
- Pitch the right collaboration ideas
The same goes for link outreach. Follow the principles above and you will see more success for your link outreach campaigns.
Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter X.
SEO
Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model.
The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another large language model.
What they found is that the ToT approach was successful against GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, using a remarkably low number of queries to obtain a jailbreak, on average less than thirty queries.
Tree Of Thoughts Reasoning
A Google research paper from around May 2022 discovered Chain of Thought Prompting.
Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy used on a generative AI to make it follow a sequence of steps in order to solve a problem and complete a task. The CoT method is often accompanied with examples to show the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning task.
So, rather than just ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a task, the chain of thought method instructs the AI how to follow a path of reasoning that’s composed of a series of steps.
Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning, sometimes referred to as Tree of Thought (singular) is essentially a variation and improvement of CoT, but they’re two different things.
Tree of Thoughts reasoning is similar to CoT. The difference is that rather than training a generative AI to follow a single path of reasoning, ToT is built on a process that allows for multiple paths so that the AI can stop and self-assess then come up with alternate steps.
Tree of Thoughts reasoning was developed in May 2023 in a research paper titled Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (PDF)
The research paper describes Tree of Thought:
“…we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving.
ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.
Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities…”
Tree Of Attacks With Pruning (TAP)
This new method of jailbreaking large language models is called Tree of Attacks with Pruning, TAP. TAP uses two LLMs, one for attacking and the other for evaluating.
TAP is able to outperform other jailbreaking methods by significant margins, only requiring black-box access to the LLM.
A black box, in computing, is where one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. But what happens in the middle is unknown, thus it’s said to be in a black box.
Tree of thoughts (TAP) reasoning is used against a targeted LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively try different prompting, assess the results, then if necessary change course if that attempt is not promising.
This is called a process of iteration and pruning. Each prompting attempt is analyzed for the probability of success. If the path of attack is judged to be a dead end, the LLM will “prune” that path of attack and begin another and better series of prompting attacks.
This is why it’s called a “tree” in that rather than using a linear process of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear because the reasoning process branches off to other areas of reasoning, much like a human might do.
The attacker issues a series of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to those prompts and then makes a decision as to what the next path of attack will be by making a call as to whether the current path of attack is irrelevant or not, plus it also evaluates the results to determine the likely success of prompts that have not yet been tried.
What’s remarkable about this approach is that this process reduces the number of prompts needed to jailbreak GPT-4. Additionally, a greater number of jailbreaking prompts are discovered with TAP than with any other jailbreaking method.
The researchers observe:
“In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM.
TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target.
Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks.
Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target.
In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.”
Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning
Another interesting conclusion reached in the research paper is that, for this particular task, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when adding pruning to the CoT method, where off topic prompting is pruned and discarded.
ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo
The researchers discovered that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t perform well with CoT, revealing the limitations of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Actually, GPT 3.5 performed exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success rate to only a 4.2% success rate.
This is their observation about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:
“We observe that the choice of the evaluator can affect the performance of TAP: changing the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success rate from 84% to 4.2%.
The reason for the reduction in success rate is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the target model is jailbroken (for the provided goal) and, hence, preemptively stops the method.
As a consequence, the variant sends significantly fewer queries than the original method…”
What This Mean For You
While it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT method to beat an LLM with another LLM, it also highlights the usefulness of ToT for generating surprising new directions in prompting in order to achieve higher levels of output.
- TL/DR Takeaways:
- Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought methods
- GPT 3.5 worked significantly poorly in comparison to GPT 4 in ToT
- Pruning is a useful part of a prompting strategy
- Research showed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning task like jailbreaking an LLM
Read the original research paper:
Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)
Featured Image by Shutterstock/THE.STUDIO
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