I also think he is talking about a different type of SEO than the rest of the audience here.
For most people, they run a business, and their web presence is a tool to improve that business, and SEO is a tool to improve its effectiveness.
But cookiecaper seems to be talking about a totally different kind of SEO, in which the base goal is to generate traffic and monetize it, so SEO becomes the primary tool by which you look for easy keywords to target, and write content specifically for the search engines, not for a human audience supporting a pre-existing business.
That entire scenario is fundamentally based on gaming SEO. It is a short-term play for cash, and some people do well with it. But we're comparing apples to oranges when trying to match that up with the way an actual business would approach SEO.
Our traffic wasn't "monetized" directly -- we never had ads of any kind on the site. We offered a service that people who were interested in the topic we blogged about generally found desirable, so our content was generated to bring people in to the site and expose them to this service, hoping they'd decide to pay for it. That sounds like an "actual business" to me.
Most of the aggressive SEO players I know about are supporting "actual businesses", not content farms that survive on ads. Our aggressive competitor had no content to monetize directly and no ads, they were competing with our service.
Note well that suggesting Google may not be all-knowing draws out the lackeys accusing anyone who may speak this heresy of not running an "actual business". Implying, yet again, that the only reason someone would speak ill of Google is because they're too perfect. Give me a break.
All of this misses the point regardless, because it's not "gaming" the system when you're playing by the rules. Google wants you to believe that its algorithm is perfect, so it says the best way to rank is to write good content, which they will magically identify and publicize. So you pay someone to write good content for your site and, as long as this content is actually original and useful, you're doing exactly as Google directs. That's not what "gaming" is.
SEO is still a thing because people come in naive enough to believe that good content will stand on its own merits, like I did, and then quickly learn it doesn't actually play out that way in real life.
For most people, they run a business, and their web presence is a tool to improve that business, and SEO is a tool to improve its effectiveness.
But cookiecaper seems to be talking about a totally different kind of SEO, in which the base goal is to generate traffic and monetize it, so SEO becomes the primary tool by which you look for easy keywords to target, and write content specifically for the search engines, not for a human audience supporting a pre-existing business.
That entire scenario is fundamentally based on gaming SEO. It is a short-term play for cash, and some people do well with it. But we're comparing apples to oranges when trying to match that up with the way an actual business would approach SEO.