SEO defenders argue that despite GoogleBing's claims of trying to rank based on user experience, in practice there are ranking signals that have nothing to do w

SEO defenders argue that despite GoogleBing's claims of trying to rank based on user experience, in practice there are ranking signals that have nothing to do with user experience, and therefore "bad" SEO is justified to optimize those extraneous signals. They don't help improve the site; they improve search rankings, though, and until GoogleBing do away with those extraneous signals, you have to play the SEO game or you'll get beaten by equivalent-quality sites who do. I too prefer improving a site rather than gaming search engines, and I've argued against SEO consultants who want to do things like keyword-stuff urls, but now I sympathize with the pro-"bad"-SEO argument even though I prefer not to get involved in that kind of SEO.