http://www.simplosys.com/blog/is-seo-spam
I remember having a heated debate with a friend that works at Yahoo Search about whether SEO involves spamming the search engines for links and whether all SEO's are spammers. He seemed to be a right-wing conservative on this matter, understandable, considering his job every day is to come up with ways to make seach better and SEO's skewing results makes it harder for him. I've given this a lot of thought and I've come to the conclusion that, if done right, it's not. The focus should be on making sure that's value addition to the Internet all along the way.
Testimony to this is that even Yahoo, in their web hosting packages, has entire sections dedicated to SEO, and in fact, has a blog dedicated to that as well...http://ystoreblog.com/blog/category/seosem/. So I guess seo is not really spamming afterall. Finding creative ways to get links is not a bad thing then...it's just marketing. Spamming is bad though, and we all agree on that. The line is gray and it will remain that way until some of the geniuses at the Search Engine companies figure out a way to truly differentiate good content from bad, and start giving less importance to links and more to quality unique content.
There are some very good posts on this topic. I've read many over the years and I am going to list them as I run into more on this topic..
