Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on search. These opinions are my own and based only on the linked article.
I took a beating on the SEO blogs for calling SEO a bug a few months ago, but I'm glad the rest of the world is finally realizing that I'm right :)
Ultimately, Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best content; you shouldn't be spending your time trying to figure out how to game Google by making superficial changes to the presentation of your content. Want to rank better? Write better!
The whole problem is rooted in the fact that Google is a leaky abstraction. It tries to be an omniscient Sherpa, guiding the wary Web traveler with its infinite understanding of the Web and the individual user's needs. The reality, though, is that Google is actually just a computer program. So there is a gap between the user's mental model of Google and what Google actually does, and it's this gap that SEO exploits for its own profit.
An infinite amount of exploitation would mean that Google would just return results randomly, and so it makes a lot of sense to detect signs of SEO and penalize the behavior before it further broadens the perfection/reality gap. Gaming the system is currently profitable, since the worst thing that can happen to you is nothing, but the best thing is that you get more traffic. A penalty aligns the risk/reward spectrum to favor "write better content" rather than with "spam a bunch of wikis".
>Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best content...Want to rank better? Write better!
The real world doesn't always work like that. I do a lot of work for an eCommerce site that sells wholesale. Their customers have little to no interest in reading text, all they want are pictures. Which means, the catalogue pages, which are optimised for actual human visitors and not Google robots, contain little to no text, only pictures. As a result, the catalogue pages (most important part of the site) do not rank anywhere with Google, and never will. Google is unable to handle websites that are - quite correctly - all about the pictures. Competitor sites that outrank this particular site design their catalogue pages for Google, not for humans, and rank well because of it.
There's a case to be made that detecting and penalizing SEO is making results worse, if, as you suppose, SEO for a sufficiently good search engine is equivalent to producing good content.
Obviously Google doesn't think their search is good enough, and I would agree -- piling more "inputs" and arbitrary branches into a ranking algorithm, however, is no solution. This will only devolve into an endless game of cat and mouse until a new search engine comes along and does to Google what Google did to Yahoo.
I took a beating on the SEO blogs for calling SEO a bug a few months ago, but I'm glad the rest of the world is finally realizing that I'm right :)
Ultimately, Google is trying to rank you highly for providing the best content; you shouldn't be spending your time trying to figure out how to game Google by making superficial changes to the presentation of your content. Want to rank better? Write better!
The whole problem is rooted in the fact that Google is a leaky abstraction. It tries to be an omniscient Sherpa, guiding the wary Web traveler with its infinite understanding of the Web and the individual user's needs. The reality, though, is that Google is actually just a computer program. So there is a gap between the user's mental model of Google and what Google actually does, and it's this gap that SEO exploits for its own profit.
An infinite amount of exploitation would mean that Google would just return results randomly, and so it makes a lot of sense to detect signs of SEO and penalize the behavior before it further broadens the perfection/reality gap. Gaming the system is currently profitable, since the worst thing that can happen to you is nothing, but the best thing is that you get more traffic. A penalty aligns the risk/reward spectrum to favor "write better content" rather than with "spam a bunch of wikis".