Ruining it for everybody

Seth Godin says on his blog today that search engine optimization is a black art and is generally not worth paying for. This is true. The other thing not mentioned there is that search engine optimization essentially undermines Google's value as a search engine. I posted about this before. If everyone is gaming the system, the comment spammers, fake site builders and SEO-d sites rise to the top and the search results are crap. Of course, if everyone else is doing it, your business probably can't afford not to be doing it too. And so the circle becomes increasingly vicious.