I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest.
Compare that to television, radio or print advertising, do you get the impression anyone is competing to provide the most useful information ?
Lying and misleading people is wrong, but that doesn't seem to be a huge part of most SEO activity.
The most common activity I see is people saying "hmm what can I put out there that other people will be interested in", that's an absolutely amazingly positive result.
I'm not sure that Google or the SEO motivation is the driver. The web prior to Google and prior to most monetization also had experts competing to put as much free stuff online as they could, and to let people know about it, with the main motivation being either people who had things they wanted to say, or some variety of social prestige. There's more total information these days, of course, but I think the proportion that's legitimate (versus content-farm) is also lower.
Some people suggest that with their adsense product, they encourage you to write pages that look like what people want, that turn up high on a query, something good enough that people don't immediately hit 'back' but that don't answer the question. If you answer the user's question, they are much less likely to click on your adsense ads.
Now, sometimes it kinda works okay; I know one guy who writes a fair bit of technical documentation; documentation that he promotes the hell out of, and that gives him fairly high pagerank. The problem is, programmers don't click ads. So what did the guy do? he threw in some pages about 'free MP3 downloads' with some free mp3s on there... of legal, free music that nobody wants, of course, but he makes orders of magnitude more money from the ads on that page, that page that ranks highly (because it's on a high pagerank site, and because it's got all the keywords) but that has no content that anyone actually wants.
I mean, personally, I don't have a problem with making money misdirecting people who search for "free MP3s" - but it does make google objectively worse.
I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest.
Seems to me that it's more like a vicious cycle in which people compete to stuff pages full of the right keywords at the expense of content.
Compare that to television, radio or print advertising, do you get the impression anyone is competing to provide the most useful information ?
Lying and misleading people is wrong, but that doesn't seem to be a huge part of most SEO activity.
The most common activity I see is people saying "hmm what can I put out there that other people will be interested in", that's an absolutely amazingly positive result.
My 2 cents.