I don't think this is a good analogy. Google's job is to make sure good content is ranked high and crap is ranked low. You should just create content that is useful to others and let Google figure out how to discover it and rank it high (they are good at it).

To create useful content, you don't need to know Google internals.

And we would just do this if Google actually made good on their promises to do this, but I see an awful lot of crap still ranking in the SERPs especially because of hacked sites and link networks.

Full disclosure - I work in SEO.

The solution to no-content black hattery is not to promote your no-content site with black hat techniques. Nobody here is criticizing site tuning and at the same time defending content farms. Why defend misbehavior as a justification for misbehavior?

Note that I am not saying that you yourself perform any of this in your role. Our anger is not at site tuning and placement but the techniques used to do so, which you appear to be unnecessarily defending as essential for any site's survival.

Your comment doesn't make any sense. Of course the solution to something bad isn't promoting it with something bad. That's just ridiculous and I would never argue that.

You're automatically assuming that SEO is bad, or is all blackhat, or is just about promoting crap. I would argue vehemently that good SEOs only want to promote good content. I turn down many freelance gigs because the company is shit.

I think you're confusing legitimate SEO with crap affiliate marketing. Big difference there, buddy.

You replied a person who said to just create content that was useful to others with suggesting that you would do that, only if there weren't hacked sites jumbling up the rankings. It ~seemed~ to suggest that you were less interested in original, interesting content than you were competing with the top sites regardless of how either of you got to that spot.

I said that we'd just do that if... The just implies that we do that plus other things.

If this were truly the case, we shouldn't expect quality sites to benefit from SEO. In practice, they do.

I'm not saying SEO is not effective, it certainly works, but it shouldn't, and it is Google job to make it happen.

On a high level good sites don't benefit from SEO, because it wastes time and money on something that should be granted: good sites should be ranked high, crap sites should be ranked low. SEO is a cargo cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science) with no benefits to society.

If SEO is provably effective, it is by definition not a cargo cult. The defining feature of a cargo cult is that it's questionable at best whether their practices lead to the goal they want to achieve (e.g. making fake walkie talkies and yelling into them hoping that a plane will drop cargo because you saw someone with a real walkie talkie make that happen).

Except SEO isn't a typical use case. It like complaining that newer tires made for better grip in the wet aren't as good as cutting people off during rush hour.