You realize Google offers an official guide to SEO right[1]? Why would they offer a guide for 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'? The answe

You realize Google offers an official guide to SEO right[1]? Why would they offer a guide for 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'? The answer? They aren't offering a guide for tricking anything, they're offering a guide about how to properly structure your site so that it is easily crawlable and identifiable by their spiders so searchers can query for what you have to offer. The core purpose of SEO is to do exactly what you said here: "The whole premise of the open web is that natural selection would allow rich information to be filtered through because it is good." It's called Search Engine OPTIMIZATION for a reason. The goal is to build very well structured sites by following specific sets of best practices. Sure, there are lots of spammers out there. But just like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't necessarily a square, a spammer is an SEO but an SEO isn't necessarily a spammer. Stop spewing FUD. 1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-s...