>> Google is only negative, in my opinion, about people abusing SEO
>> thoughts - which opens the cans of worms about what is deemed ethical
>> and what is not. :)

>This the main thrust of my question I suppose; what is 'ethical'?. I have
>looked into doing optimisation on the site myself and looked into some
>forums and newsgroups, but they are so full of contradiction and confused
>people, it is difficult to draw out any concrete knowledge from them. It was
>also consuming way too much of my time and detracting from my main duties;
>hence we are considering hiring a professional to do it.

>But when paying for a service from a professional (say an electrician), you
>don't expect to have to hang a sign on your door saying that the electrics
>on the premises were done by Bob's Electricals. You pay for the service, if
>they want to use you to advertise, they can pay you for the advertising
>space. Unless of course they offer a sizable discount for including these
>footer links.

>But this is it; what exactly is 'ethical SEO'?

>I don't want to pay for a
>service that is going to end up delivering traffic and then getting us
>banned six months down the line for spammy tactics.
>Every SEO company we have looked at claims to do things ethically, but BMM
>is quite obviously doing things a little suspiciously. I have received a
>mail in reply to this posting regarding the Alitalia site I mentioned, by
>disabling JavaScript in your browser and viewing the site, the neat little
>nav menu on the left is replaced with a long (much longer than the menu it
>replaces) & unstyled list of internal links that do not point to the same
>pages that the menu they are replacing point to.  I can see that there are
>good reasons to have support for non-JS capable browsers (and other forms of
>accessibility), but this seems a little excessive.

>Is this sort of behaviour likely to cause our site problems?

>Or is this the
>'norm' in SEO circles?

> And what is classed as 'ethical'? I know there is
>likely to be a fair dollop of grey in the middle, but what is
>no-argument-white?