It's not really ironic at all. You're right that there are a lot of websites mentioned on this forum, and a lot of times it's not considered a problem at all. In those cases though it's usually the kind of natural link to a website based on it's content. The kind of thing like hey check out this video, or hey check out this great deal on whatever. In those cases it kinda just depends on what its about as to whether it violates any rules. But it's a completely different thing when a website is posted so as to scrutinize what's being done to rank it.
Yes, this is a marketing forum and it would be great if we actually could post example websites that are doing great, but in the process of doing that you're also placing a beacon on that guys website telling google, potential competetors, clients, advertisers, and anyone else that might have an interest in whether he's doing things the way they think it should be done. A lot of the seo strategies discussed on this forum violate the guidelines of companies and corporations that we depend on for that very ranking.
This isn't some weird arbitrary rule. How would you feel if you had worked hard and spent a lot of money getting your own sites to the #1 placement in the serps and then your site gets slapped down, not because you made a mistake to draw googles scrutiny to your site but because what you were doing was highlighted on a marketing forum.
Every one of us on this forum with websites have to be concerned about that very thing happening to our own sites. We can't prevent that from happening sometimes, but as a precaution a forum rule was made here to prevent inadvertently drawing attention to what one of our peers might be doing.
