There have been a couple of pretty interesting articles written this week that ask a legitimate (if not somewhat sensationalized) question:  Does Google consider SEOs to be criminals?

SEOs being SEOs are, by definition, people who make a living trying to manipulate the results of search engines.  Now, before you eat me alive here... I don’t necessarily mean manipulate in a negative sense.  But in many aspects ‘optimization’ and ‘manipulation’ are somewhat interchangeable terms. An SEO ‘optimizes’ a site in an attempt to enhance that site’s search engine rank or placement.  By moving a site in the results, you are, by definition, manipulating the results.

There is nothing wrong with that.  There are lots of sites that aren’t ‘search engine friendly’ and lots of sites that just do things ‘wrong’ that, when fixed, will notice an enhancement in their positioning for search queries relevant to their site.  Search engines don’t mind this.  The existence of resources like Webmaster Central are a testament to this. 

So the search engines have rules for SEOs and the SEOs can either choose to follow the rules, or they can not follow the rules and face the consequences.

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