"Destruction of the Web" is a bit hyperbolic. I tried the SEO game for the interest of my clients, I've come to realize that it's a better long term strategy t

"Destruction of the Web" is a bit hyperbolic. I tried the SEO game for the interest of my clients, I've come to realize that it's a better long term strategy to simply focus on good, relevant content and let nature take it's course. When you're publishing content targeted at a certain audience, spammy visits to your website just increase your bandwidth cost without much benefit. Granted there is inherent benefit in coming in on top of a google search, but time and time again, I've seen good content naturally dominate and stay on top. Occasionally some black had spammer comes out on top. And truth of the matter is, I think it's google/<insert search engine here>'s job to figure out a way to discern good content from spam. Google Dominated early on, b/c they were able to parse thru a lot of the garbage and find you what you were looking for. There will always be spammers. And if this whole arms race thing is true, I think the spammers are likely to hit a ceiling before Google or another search engine is. As a programmer, my initial instinct was to write code to counter what Google's algorithm would expect. Then, I thought, if I'm going to put in that much work, why the hell not build a better search engine myself? I believe that if Google doesn't do a great job of getting the best possible results, not only do they face a treat from other giants like bing, but also from crafty programmers who may be writing black hat seo crap now and have the epiphany to try to build a better search engine (yes... I know... I think PG has a real point with the search engine thing)