Are these ethical SEO? - was RE: Hidden link directory ethical?

I'm the co-author of the E-consultancy Best Practice Guide to SEO and we have had some interesting discussions about SEO ethics - its a massive decision when selecting an agency and then reviewing their performance. 

All agencies will say their ethical, but what does it mean in practice over the hundreds of optimisation techniques we discuss in the guide. How do you balance the risk of unethical practice against the lower visits/sales that will definitely result from a purely ethical approach where pages are created by content editors without any thought for SEO other than creating appropriate meta data / titles for the document. 

While most would see the example discussed here as unethical, there are some more challenging issues. Here's a couple of examples:

1. Creating content and site link structures specifically for Search.
An increasingly common SEO approach is to create different SEO entry pages themed around a keyphrase which reflect users behaviour when typing keyphrases (not doorway pages which are not part of the main site structure / nav and most would agree are unethical).

For example, these two companies perform well on these phrases and related ones (see the links in the footer) for which specific entry pages have been created.

http://www.admiral.com/a-insurance-quotes/car-insurance-quotes.phtml 

http://www.talktalk.co.uk/talktalk/servlet/gben-server-PageServer?ARTICLE=SEARCH.SO.CHEAPBUSCALL

This seems to fail Ashley's test since the pages have clearly been created for SEO reasons and most site visitors wouldn't view these pages. It could be argued that they match what users are looking for which makes them ethical. 

As a marketer, this seems to be good practice to me - anticipating different customer behaviours.

2. On-page optimisation
In the guide we go into the details of how to optimise page content using the standard approaches of creating keyphrase rich content and meta data. This is specifically undertaken to improve rankings in the natural listings.  Most would consider this ethical, but I'm not sure it passes the Friedlein Ethical SEO test.

3. Link-building
Pro-active link-building campaigns, buying links and link exchanges are often done more for the benefit of increasing position in the search results than generating direct visits from the other sites. If as a digital marketing company you buy a static link / text ad on E-consultancy or NetImperative or other directory is this unethical. I don't think so.

What do you think - particularly about 1.? 

Perhaps we need a more rigorous test, but I did like the simple one.

Dave Chaffey
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Internet Marketing trainer, consultant and author
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk
Blog: www.davechaffey.com