I've noticed some people will use the terms "black hat SEO" and "white hat SEO" to distinguish between sleazy and not-sleazy SEO practices.

SEO = gaming search engines = negative behavior.

White hat SEO = following a search engine's rules = positive behavior.

Disparage not that which you do not understand.

If the goal of SEO is to manipulate a site's position in search engine rankings, I don't care what color the hat is. I don't want the site's owner to be able to do that. I want the results of my searches to be based on their relevance to my query, and not on the degree to which the people who stand to profit from my attention to their sites have manipulated the system.

The ultimate search engine would be ungameable, and SEO would be a waste of time because it would accomplish nothing. To the degree that SEO works at all, it is a bad thing.

Google itself explicitly encourages people to SEO their sites. So much so that they publish a SEO starter guide for webmasters and SEO professionals [1].

SEO isn't what you think it is, yet you continue to paint all of SEO with your broad brush. Stop.

[1] (pdf) - https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrus...

Are you claiming that "SEO" no longer stands for "search engine optimization", or are you claiming that "search engine optimization" is no longer about "optimizing" a site for "search engine" result placement?

I'm claiming that your characterization of all such "optimization" as malicious is misguided.

White hat is not exploiting the rules of a game, it is following the rules. Proper SEO according to G is doing everything you can to make your site interact well with crawlers. That's akin to following directions when applying for a job, or following the rules when playing a sport. You can't be considered for the job if you don't apply properly, and you'll soon be disqualified if you ignore the rules of a sport. Same with search: if your site doesn't comply with a search engine's standards for crawling, you won't have the opportunity to be ranked fairly.

It's all about the scope of what you would consider "SEO" projects. Would you consider creating search-friendly URLs SEO projects or just best practices?

That's one of the first things I think about when I look at a site from a SEO perspective: can the bots easily digest this site.

A large part of SEO is just making it obvious what your page is about. This helps both the user and the search engine. A lot of it is just usability, but usability specifically for a user who is coming from a search engine.

I think I need to link to the relevant XKCD here: http://xkcd.com/810/ And to slightly paraphrase: "But what will you do when Spammers provide useful and relevant content" "Mission Fucking Accomplished"

I'm not saying that's where we are -- But that's hopefully the end-goal