Real hackers build spam filters and search engine so people can find the information they are looking for. Spewing spam and tricking the search engines to prefer your content are two facets of the same disease.
Real hackers are on both sides of the spam game. There is too much money for smart people to not do it.
For a short time I worked for a company who was very spammy and outright sketchy. They had a team of dev and ops people who cranked out hundreds of millions of emails and "free ipod ads" per day.
There were heavy API integrations with Commission Junction and the porn affiliate networks, redundant systems, and all that. I leaned a lot in the 45 days I worked there.
All of them "hackers" in this sense. They got the job done, and it worked. But I hated every minute of it.
01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes - the landlords and farmers, the workers and capitalists - revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one. The hacker class.
02. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce - it owns us.
03. And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers, as artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still struggling to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of producing abstraction in the world. Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself.
I am equating SEO with 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'. The whole premise of the open web is that natural selection would allow rich information to be filtered through because it is good. Producing garbage and tricking the tools which filter information are both counterproductive pursuits.
You realize Google offers an official guide to SEO right[1]? Why would they offer a guide for 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'?
The answer? They aren't offering a guide for tricking anything, they're offering a guide about how to properly structure your site so that it is easily crawlable and identifiable by their spiders so searchers can query for what you have to offer.
The core purpose of SEO is to do exactly what you said here: "The whole premise of the open web is that natural selection would allow rich information to be filtered through because it is good." It's called Search Engine OPTIMIZATION for a reason. The goal is to build very well structured sites by following specific sets of best practices.
Sure, there are lots of spammers out there. But just like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't necessarily a square, a spammer is an SEO but an SEO isn't necessarily a spammer.
Real hackers build spam filters and search engine so people can find the information they are looking for. Spewing spam and tricking the search engines to prefer your content are two facets of the same disease.