> To have barely relevant results today you need to be good

An easy way to become way better than google — detect google ads on pages, and penalize these pages in the index. For obvious reason, google search is incapable of doing so.

Yes, I think you'd call it a Red Queen Problem:

“Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

-Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass

But shouldn't all the blogspam be so hyperoptimized for Google's algorithm that is should be straightforward to detect and ignore/downrank it?

I read auto-generated pages almost to the end before realizing it was SEO spam. (I am not a native English speaker though)

With content copying, shuffling and AI generating, I am afraid we are on the cusp of auto content generators passing some restricted Turing test where readers really think it's an actual human that wrote it.

As for me, I leant that for certain "hot topics", simply doing a generic search on Google is not a good idea anymore.

Yeah, I do this with my search engine. Works pretty well. A complementary approach that works well is to look at where blogs written by humans link. Very few spam blogs get links from humans.

No because google's algorithm is not well known publicly. Also, if it was straightforward to detect then google could downrank it as well.

I wonder if you could evaluate a page using your own algorithm, which is probably not gamed as much as Google's (because who cares about your search engine?)

Then, check Google's ranking of the page. If it is much higher than it seems the page should be, assume the page is being SEO hyper-optimized and penalize the page proportionately.

Basically, using the variance between Google's model and your model as an indicator of an SEO spam page.

The point is that SEO would just immediately adapt to Google's changes. If a smaller search engine filtered these out then it would likely stay under the radar.

SEO often seems to be a compensation for the fact that a site doesn't have particularly worthwhile content. So punishing SEO surprisingly does promote higher quality of search results.

Yes and no. A lot of those sites are small local businesses trying to get found. A front page listing can be the difference between surviving and going under. Much of the time the blog spam is what floats hours, contact info, and services provided to the first page.

Be that as it may, search ranking is a zero sum game. The unfair advantage SEO gives this particular struggling business means another goes under. I'd rather punish the guy trying to game the system than the one with enough principles not to.

The difference is far more likely to be in capability or expertise than principles.

Either way, capability for fuckery is not something I'd want to encourage.

Eschewing SEO isn't incompetence, it's moral principle and good character. I'd much rather have a surgeon who doesn't moonlight harvesting organs OD:ing junkies.

It's not that easy, they are optimized for many metrics..