Google Says: If You Don’t Report Deception To Us, You Are Not Ethical
It’s just my day to pick on Google, but I think they can take the heat. 
On Google’s page What’s An SEO, Google gives a few good cautionary tips for webmasters that might be hiring a Search Engine Optimization individual or firm.
However, in doing so, they snuck in two self-serving lines that have absolutely nothing to do with the qualifications, ethics, or morality of Search Engine Optimization:
“Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. “
“Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google’s spam guidelines.”
This statement explicitly says that any SEO firm which does not use Google’s Spam Report page every time they see a site that might be using techniques outside of Google’s Terms of Service and/or Google’s Webmaster Guidelines is not ethical.
Imagine?
Where I come from this is called arm-twisting or stong-arming, it’s using fear to manipulate the honest, hard working, folks in the search engine optimization business in order that Google’s search engine gains better standings in the search market.
*sigh*
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Agreed.
It’s arguably unethical of Google to include such conditions which certainly appear to suggest other search engines are less relevant…
Google need to take responsibility for their search engine, and stop lumping that on hardworking and ethical internet businesses.
It’s rather rich for Google to claim it is an ethical company after the debacle it made with PR and the fact it is still trying to tout itself as webmaster-friendly, whilst it pushes it’s advertisers to the top of the rankings.
What SEOs should be doing is reporting those advertisers that use their accounts with Google to circumvent penalty, and they should turn the blowtorch back on Google by outing them every time one of these advertisers is caught at the top of the rankings.
Google are fast becoming more evil than Microsoft ever was.