Of course guys marketing these products are going to defend them. Who can blame them really except to say a good product doesn't need to be defended. If there's nothing wrong with product or process then why does it need to be defended?

Can smartpages get your domain banned? Absolutely and even product creators advise to never host smartpages on your main domain. They advise you to upload smartpages to another domain with a different webhost on a different IP address. If smartpages are so totally harmless and ethical then why do you need to hide them like this?

Are smartpages still effective? To a lesser extent yes they can still be used as part of a search engine optimization policy. A far better policy however is to simply put useful, keyword rich content on your site and enjoy lots of legitimate search engine traffic for years to come.

For webmaster looking to optimize his or her site for search engines, there are many good resources on internet to learn basics. This basics will cover use of title tag, headers (H1/H2 etc), keyword density, metatags, choice of domain name, link and site architecture and link naming, and probably most important aspect, link popularity. Link popularity refers to how many sites link to a given website. Link popularity and text used in actual links are very important to many search engines in terms of way they rank sites.

A good base to start from is to create a website that has interesting content. This is because this may encourage people to link to your site from their sites, because they find your site a useful resource. One way links to your site are generally powerful rank helpers. So, if you want to encourage people to link to you, start with your site's content.