Is this good in the long run?
Your thoughts?
Argument for: the function of those machines is to help people, so a) optimising for the machines is indirectly beneficial to people because they're happier when the machines work better, and b) as the machines get better at understanding what's good for people, optimising for the machines becomes more directly beneficial to people because they both "want" the same thing.
The web would be better if everyone simultaneously stopped doing SEO and started thinking about people directly instead of indirectly via Google's ranking algorithms, but now that the arms race is in full effect and there are a million parasites making a living from it, the best case scenario is for Google to continue to close the gap between "good for machines" and "good for people" so that the satisfaction of the SEO gods translates as completely as possible into the satisfaction of human users.
If you think about "people" directly, I would imagine that those people, in your mind, all browse the web with your web browser, in your OS, with your abilities. These people all find content the same way you do.
Of course, we both know that many people do not browse the web in IE8, just as many do not browse the web in Windows at all. A great number (but perhaps a tiny percentage) don't have flash.
Having a nice objective measure of what makes a page accessible is a very useful thing for a web developer.
Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged?
What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or is this another "tragedy of the common"?
In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?
I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.
Silver lining: SEO rules are mandated by a Tech company like Google who can push an agenda for better web-standards.
The problem is the people that do black-hat SEO, they will always be around screwing things up for others through scamming and spamming.
Which is still better than http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQI... (add 100+ chars) type of URLs we used to have before the SEO era.
Most SEO is nothing more than basic web concepts implemented right. People benefits from that, too.
Personally I like the fact that someone can search for something rather specific and find something that's relevant, as opposed to the traditional mid-90s method of using 4 or 5 different search engines and 3 or 4 directories to hopefully find what you want.
IMHO, Google had a few settings wrong (call them "bugs" if you want) in early 2000s which many techies capitalised on. It's no different than finding a loophole in the finance industry regulation and trying to get away with it. In the case of Google's bugs, Google eventually reacted and became much more stringent. Sadly, by then the reputation damage to SEO has been done.
As for sentences for URLs, I agree with you. There is a fine balance between saying domain.com/widgets/green and domain.com/buy-new-and-used-widgets-green . I always ask which one would you rather speak over the phone, and that gets the point across.
Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".
Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.
Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks who had sites black listed by them.
If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.
I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.
When client asks "can't we just Flashajax the hell out of it?" they won't listen to response that it won't be accessible, standards-compliant, etc. But they do listen to "No, Googlebot won't index it".
The most effective tricks these days mostly involve passing as much link juice to the site as possible, and matching it to good content that is based on sound keyword research and user demand. In order to do this in such a way that actually makes a significant difference in ranking without being penalized is usually beyond the the average developer "dabbling" in SEO. The blackhat term for this is "link laundering" and it's really the only way to get the huge traffic gains in a reliable and sustained manner. Most SEO companies fit into one of the 3 following types:
1. Basic SEO is getting easier to execute with all the hand-holding that Google gives out to webmasters these days, however the benefits are minimal. Most of that realm is about making sure you're not screwing up your content, rather than optimizing it. The kinds of gains you get by doing this are maybe a 30% increase in traffic, assuming you site is not screwed up to begin with.
2. On the other hand, using link laundering/pyramids even less talented SEOs can see somewhere in the area of a 400% increase in traffic without much risk of a penalty. This is a lot trickier though because imitating a strong, natural, niche link graph is a lot harder than most people think.
3. The last strategy is commonly referred to as "turn and burn". This basically involves taking whatever content you have and link spamming the hell out of it which will cause it's traffic to spike briefly before being banned from Google's index. Ever seen all those spammy comments in you blogs that are pointing to a really crappy landing page? This is what they are doing.
Now granted I've made a lot of generalities here. Most of the time I see people discussing this topic they seem to not understand what SEO is compared to what it was 7 years ago which is why I'm taking the time here to explain this. The rules change a little when you start out with a valuable asset such as a large quantity of good content (such as any of the Q&A sites), or a set of very high quality links (anyone that's been covered by the major news outlets) because you can base your strategy on getting the most out of those assets.
Anyway, now that I've gone off on that tangent the easy answer is yes, good SEO is good for the web because it makes content more usable and accessible, and bad SEO is bad for the web because it means more spam.
Good SEO is good for the Web, bad SEO is bad for the Web.