[bradleyjg]

> Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"?

There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."

What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.

[leephillips]

Well, there is the classic W.C. Fields movie, "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man". It opens with a con where a cashier pretends to be distracted and acts like he is overcounting the change for a customer, who grabs the money and runs. But the ruse is to cover up the fact that the cashier actually short-changed the customer, who, if he had tried to protect the cashier from giving him too much change, would not have been cheated.