Everyone in this industry has a personal Code of Conduct whether written or not. In our version we believe that "do not deceive" is at the top and applies to everyone: search engines, clients, and site visitors alike. As such, the basic theme of our personal Code of Conduct is to avoid deceptive practices at all costs. The generally accepted measurements of optimization success is [ranking / traffic / conversion / return], and hence our industry is dependant upon the continued good will of the search engines. By acting to identify and speak out against attempts to falsify the content of a web site through deception, the search engine relevancy will improve and the industry will earn the support of the search engines

Understand that if you deceive a search engine you also deceive the consumer, and we consider that form of false advertising to be unacceptable. Today, far too many SEO practitioners are part of the problem and not a part of the solution. Sure, there will always be a few SEO practitioners that lag behind and protest loudly and who will continue to deceive because the revenue opportunity by using deception sometimes exceeds the penalty if caught (or because they simply do not know any better) but over time accountability will prevail.