It’s an exploit pure and simple, the same way your tax accountant (as I mentioned) will “exploit” the system of tax laws to get you a better tax return, or a lawyer will “exploit” certain legal systems to get you a more favorable court ruling.

The only question that matters therefore is one of public perception. (How much does the public value/like lawyers for instance?) This is the challenge for SEOs; maintaining a “don’t be evil” public illusion while holding the gate keys and being the gatekeepers (a challenge they are obviously meeting with limited success ~ as communities like Digg and MBL are a currently testament to).

The best thing SEOs as a community might explore is a widely adopted “oath” type mechanism (such as a doctor’s “Hippocratic Oath”) to promote (at bare minimum, superficially) an acknowledgement of ethical practice to appease the outside community and downplay the indy-type, rogue, trickster, con-man, swindler image SEOs currently have. I doubt that will happen simply because SEOs are indy-types, rogues, tricksters etc. who don’t “play-by-the-rules” by definition; that’s what SEO is — a modification/amplification of “the normal”, thus the optimizing activity. But now I’m getting way too technical and philosophic and idealistic at the same time and history leads me to believe idealism is not a tool often reached for in the SEO tool bag. SEO is a practical discipline with a very outsider/rebel tradition. Oftentimes that very tradition and impression rubs the less clever and less daring people the wrong way, especially if they been waiting-in-line an awfully long time (when the SEO goes speeding past ;-)

A well-crawled site won’t benefit from XML sitemaps as much as a new, large content domain that needs to be crawled and indexed quickly. It makes sense to monitor your organic crawling when you’ve achieved significant indexing.