gregbo - 8:10 pm on Jun 7, 2006 (gmt 0)

it is just that Google's primary objective is to be a search engine that returns results in a 'natural' way, thus been useful for its users. The over-exercising of SEO practises undermines Google's efforts to improve as a search engine and this is where the trouble begins in my opinion.

I could make the argument that it is natural to try to improve one's ranking. (After all, in "real life," people do things to make themselves more attractive to others.) By extension, I could argue that most SEO practices are ethical; it isn't wrong to get people to link to you, or to link to other places, or to create a large number of densely connected web pages. (And the economics of the Internet makes this inexpensive to do.) OTOH, it would be both unethical and illegal to attempt to manipulate rankings by directly altering the contents of an SE's index, or blocking its crawlers from a competitor's sites.

But at the same time, Google cannot afford to neglect issues such as link farms, excessive keyword stuffing, heading abuse and many more - as all these techniques influence search results artificially.

My general feeling is that G should have foreseen that people would attempt to boost rankings once they realized what factors influenced rankings. Early out in the development of PageRank, some of their engineers claimed their algorithms were resistant to such manipulation. No one could create such a massive undetectable link farm, etc. They didn't take into account how easy and cheap it is to create sites and links today. (Or there was a change in their policy that permitted such link farms to be indexed and rank well.)