The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that.

The financial motive is to get people looking at your website so you can sell things. SEO has always been an arms race, and I don't see how it can not be that. Occasionally there's a paradigm shift that causes one side to get massively ahead (e.g. the original Pagerank). But eventually things settle back down.