SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse st

SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent. But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building. I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.