Why SEO is Necessary
Google has pretty much always frowned on SEO. Every time a trash site pops up on page one for a competitive keyword, it makes Google look bad, and they have to invest more money into updating their algorithms and diverting resources to manual reviews.
This isn't to say that all 'SEO' is evil. The problem is that the industry is abused, with people building thousands of thin affiliate sites per day. Pros in the business have made a killing by building dozens or even hundreds of sites based on the buzz word of the week. It's a rinse and repeat process, and so far, Google hasn't been very good at punishing the people who seek these search engine loopholes.
Site owners need to draw the fine line between spamming and promoting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your website, if it's something worth visiting. Before you drop a comment on a widely visited blog, think to yourself, "Do the readers here stand to benefit from checking out my site or am I just trying to deliberately waste their time?"
Getting great exposure on the Internet is one of the few ways that people and small businesses can level the playing field and it's a shame that 'black hat' techniques such as spamming and site cloaking have given the industry such a bad rep.
Why SEO destroys the Internet
There are two main kinds of SEO, on-page search engine optimization, which includes keyword stuffing and streamlining site architecture and what I'll call off- page SEO, which focuses mainly on link building.
In the past, webmasters could rely on keyword stuffing, jamming their pages with an excess number of a specific keyword to get ranked in search engines for that term. This often resulted in unreadable content that nobody should ever be forced to sift through. Thankfully, this no longer is the dominating force in SEO -- though it still has its effects.
Now linkbuilding is the predominant means of artificially getting a site noticed. I use the term artificial to make a clear distinction from 'organic' links -- links that you would have gotten anyway because your content is actually 'link worthy'.
Nowadays, many inferior sites are ranking on page 1 for competitive keyword combinations because their owners are getting hundreds or thousands of links by spamming. Just recently, one of these spam sites, kosherhibachi.com, managed to nab the 2nd spot for the term 'auto insurance' before it was caught by Google and de-indexed.
Ultimately, this type of linkbuilding ruins the Internet because it guides users to complete and utter crap. I wouldn't have so much a problem with SEO if the pages that were benefitting from this process were actually worth visiting but that's almost never the case.
Getting noticed on the Internet needs to be a natural process that happens organically.
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Coming Soon: Why SEO is necessary