What's strange is this is not at all a new problem, and Google has historically been quite good at fighting it. The original search engines ranked pages by the

What's strange is this is not at all a new problem, and Google has historically been quite good at fighting it. The original search engines ranked pages by their content. Naturally this led to gaming by including keywords (remember huge invisible sections of pages that just repeated keywords thousands of times?). Google's original PageRank algorithm was a complete breakthrough for this, almost completely disregarding content and instead ranking results based on the text other pages had used to link to the page. This was so good, in fact, that most of the other search engines from the time didn't survive. This once again led to large-scale gaming with techniques like link farms, and a small arms race as Google came up with ways to squash these new techniques. The quasi-legitimate "SEO" industry spun out of this. I think now we're in the same cycle again, and at this moment scam sites are winning. What's to be seen is if there's a looming breakthrough, or the arms race will continue.