Ask HN: Did Google shoot themselves in the foot by creating and promoting SEO?

The job of a good search engine is to return the best possible results for the user. What Google did was tell content creators some of the signals they use to rank pages.

Some of these content creators used and abused this and got better rankings. I see many fake sites built just to link to one site, people asking for or buying links (like in the case of rap genius but which we don't hear about) and other tricks to get good rankings.

Wouldn't it had been better not to give such power to content creators and just tell them to build good content that people want to read?