There's a case to be made that detecting and penalizing SEO is making results worse, if, as you suppose, SEO for a sufficiently good search engine is equivalent to producing good content.
Obviously Google doesn't think their search is good enough, and I would agree -- piling more "inputs" and arbitrary branches into a ranking algorithm, however, is no solution. This will only devolve into an endless game of cat and mouse until a new search engine comes along and does to Google what Google did to Yahoo.
Obviously Google doesn't think their search is good enough, and I would agree -- piling more "inputs" and arbitrary branches into a ranking algorithm, however, is no solution. This will only devolve into an endless game of cat and mouse until a new search engine comes along and does to Google what Google did to Yahoo.