This was there from the very beginning. In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, th

This was there from the very beginning. In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, the primitive SEO that had degraded primitive websearch. Search, media and advertising is dynamic, cat and mouse stuff... always. I wouldn't be surprised if "Language Model Optimization (TM)" is currently being invented by a drop shipper living under his basement. Measure something, act on it, and you change the thing. You have to remember that these things have symmetry. The seo is trying to help users get to his site. From their perspective, Google's anti-spam is hostile to that goal. Google is trying to serve search results. To them, SEO is a hostile attempt to prevent that.