The fact that so-called spam techniques were used to get the page high in the search results for its actual topic doesn't matter. Everyone's a winner.

Let me be perfectly clear. There is nothing instrinsically wrong, immoral or unethical with any of the so-called search engine spam techniques and methods . Like many other things in life, some of them can be used in unscrupulous ways but, in themselves, they are perfectly good, moral and ethical. Some of them are so good, moral and ethical that the search engines themselves use them when they auto-redirect visitors to a local version of the engine, and they do it by cloaking - providing different pages to different people according to some criteria; in this case it's the geographical location.

The reason that people use the techniques and methods is to help pages rank highly in the search engine results for their topics. Nobody suggests that there is anything wrong or unethical in trying to do that. Some search engines (including Google) even suggest ways to improve a page's rankings. So people are not against trying to improve rankings, but some of them are against some of the methods that are used to do it.

We have seen that everyone approves of taking steps to improve a page's rankings, so let's look at these search engine optimization techniques and methods that people some find questionable.