> I've been at a job where we did this with Google. We had about 20 websites and 40 ad campaigns on adwords for fake companies where you could buy used dirty dishes. We wanted a topic that would have zero real-world results aside from us so we could easily compare our hypotheses and someone suggested pre-dirtied dishes. It was hilarious and had almost no search results so we went with that.
But... is that manipulation or genuine optimization? I mean, if there were people who wanted dirty dishes, and you were selling them, then helping Google help dirty-dish searchers find you is making Google better (and overall making the world a better place).
SEO is a problem when it causes mediocre, crappy, or completely irrelevant sites to be promoted over actually good sites.
We managed websites for hotels/inns/ other travel related things. We obviously did not sell pre-dirtied dishes and there is no one buying those.
We figured out what made some experiments rank higher than others, and then used those techniques on tourism related websites.
The point is our customer's websites did not rank higher based on actual merit. They ranked higher because we learned how to abuse Google. And no, the sites were not high quality. We shuttered out higher quality websites who were not abusing SEO.
But... is that manipulation or genuine optimization? I mean, if there were people who wanted dirty dishes, and you were selling them, then helping Google help dirty-dish searchers find you is making Google better (and overall making the world a better place).
SEO is a problem when it causes mediocre, crappy, or completely irrelevant sites to be promoted over actually good sites.