Absolutely. I've worked in several contracted roles within online marketing and I've heard some awful advice from self-proclaimed SEO gurus about how to achieve

Absolutely. I've worked in several contracted roles within online marketing and I've heard some awful advice from self-proclaimed SEO gurus about how to achieve a high rank for keywords on Google. A lot of what achiving high ranks is about is common sense and as Google improves their algorithm fewer tricks work. Anything past a simple competitive analysis, keyphrase analysis and a backlink analysis on you and your competitors is overkill. The quality of SEO analysts out there is so poor that I believe you could release the source code to Google's entire search engine and people would still get things wrong or believe in ways to get around what I assume is an extremely complex set of mathematically-oriented algorithms. It's a classic example of the blind following the blind, and those that typically have followers are those that are popular for performing SEO work on huge companies that would never actually need it (e.g. Coca Cola).