link building with business blog posts

Is it ethical or smacks of too much self-promotion?

[drakke]

Suppose I have two clients - a lawyer and an accountant.

It is ethical for the lawyer to post a blog entry with a link to the accountant for the purposes of link building the accountant's website?

The linked site is not in a business directly related to the linking site:

ie. lawyer ---> accountant

and they are in a different geographical location (so they probably will never share clients)

and they don't know each other personally and have never worked together.

Would Google consider this a paid link?

[cnvi]

You may be overthinking this. If the link benefits the end users of both sites, get the link.

However, you said yourself the sites are not targeting the same geo location which tells me the link is irrelevant. So you answered your own question, probably a waste of time to do it. However, one irrelevant link isnt going to cause a problem with any search engine.

[joost]

If you succeed to let the lawyer write relevant content for the accountants' blog (something legal of interest specifically to accountants), and vice versa, it looks like a winner to me. Guest blog writing is all good as far as I know.