You mean to say Google should reward White Hat SEOs?
Oh yeah, they should turn into a non-profit n' reward people who are taking away their Adwords clients.

[Link removed – Tony]

Interestingly Doug you have 4 membership pages in your top 20 search results for your name

boring.... really, there are exactly two kinds of SEO, the one that works, the one that doesn't. black hat, white hat are not very good defines categories that interests no one. talking about "beeing good" is just no strategy at all.

"Google and other search engines will have to either start ignoring blog article links"

Oh please... poor Google already has too much to ignore. What will be left then? :)

Hi Ann; What would be left? If Google would indeed ignore links in "SEO" articles what would be left would be extremely good articles with links in them. :) The majority of paid article links are found in SEO blog articles. This is especially true of articles with so-called reviews.

franz; Yes; your sentiments are the same as many in this industry. That's why it's in the state it's in now. BTW: blackhat only works until it gets caught. That's a little tidbit that many seem to ignore.

Aussie; why yes. I think they are from discussion forums, right? Some of which I may have one or two total posts in. Besides; do you actually think google weighs those types of pages for much? I don't. Thanks for making a thoughtful comment.

I have found a few spam blogs in my Google search results from time to time. I hate them because they are worthless and just waste my time. As a retaliatory tactic, I have adopted the practice of posting such web sites to delicious.com with the tags "spam, unethical, searchspam" and a brief note to warn others about it. I don't know if this is effective at all, but it makes me feel better. If there is a better way to fight them, I'd love to hear about it. I think there is a huge difference between legitimate profit-seeking SEO and these scuzzy spam blogs. I wish the people behind spam blogs would devote their intellects to more beneficial pursuits. The weird thing is that a lot of thought goes into making them: the search results appear to preview legitimate content but when you click the link it's not there. Why not just use your obvious intelligence to contribute to society in a real way?