"If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google"

This is pure stockholm syndrome, google spams their serps to no end with "Adwords" (spam) and wants to berate the webmasters..okay, thats all fine and dandy if you can get away with it, but I do find it sad that the webmaster community buys into this whole scam.

Adwords is the largest spammer on the planet.