It appears scammy because in 99% of the cases you hear about or see, it is. There are plenty of people doing things "legitimately", but they aren't the ones sel

It appears scammy because in 99% of the cases you hear about or see, it is. There are plenty of people doing things "legitimately", but they aren't the ones selling SEO services or writing books about it. Think about all SEO actually is: optimizing your content to make it easier to search engines to get it into the right hands (your readers/users/whatever). In the most basic sense, this often equates to providing accurate metadata to the search engine so it can better understand what it's indexing, so it (not you) can make the decision on who to share those links with. This very quickly turns into a game of "well, if I just add this extra keyword, I'll show up in more results". And then you add this extra keyword, then that one, then you start creating entire landing pages to rank on specific keywords just so you rank a little higher than competitors, and then you start looking up other tactics and moving your personal goalpost for which ones are acceptable (see: not too shady). Soon the same people advertising SEO services to you are advertising them to your competitors, saying, "Well, they're doing something shady; what are you going to do to compete with that?" The shadiness normalizes into "the game" and everyone progresses more and more down the rabbithole of who's doing more to game the system so they can appear higher on search engines. If you're not scamming end-users yet, you're still scamming search engines. Even "white hat" SEO [1] has become pretty corrupted with grey-area tactics over the past 5-10 years. Stepping into current techniques now gives off the impression that it's all scammy pyramid schemes because, well, it pretty much is. [1] The fact that SEO is even separated into "white hat" SEO and "black hat" SEO (and "grey hat" SEO if you want to get edgy) is a good illustration of what's wrong about how SEO is seen and perceived.