SEO spammers were a thing even before Google fucked their search results. You know when Google search results were still amazing, like decade ago? SEO spammers were thriving. I know that for a fact because I worked for one back then. 90% of why Google search sucks now is due to Google being too greedy, only the rest is caused by SEO spammers.

No, SEO made things noticeably worse from the very beginning. This is almost tautological, when you think about it.

Agree googles machinations have not helped, but disagree with your 90/10 split.

You can't really separate SEO and the Google algorithms. SEO is a product of the Google's ranking algorithms.

The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.

> Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.

Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user.

Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat.

More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.