Back in the days when it wasn't all sweetness and light between SEOs and G, I was told the 1st Rule of SEO was never to endanger a client site by having it associated with SEO.

Is this now just an old wives tale or is any such association still best hidden?

Back in the days when it wasn't all sweetness and light between SEOs and G, I was told the 1st Rule of SEO was never to endanger a client site by having it associated with SEO.

Is this now just an old wives tale or is any such association still best hidden?

SEO "associations" might provide a client's competition with enough information to investigate SEO services.

As long as you are white hat, I don't think Google has ever cared. After all it is in Google's best interest for everyone to have search engine friendly sites.

Google even provides webmaster tools to help you with SEO so I dont see a problem there.