Has the Internet gone SEO mad?

I thought the ideal for the Internet was so that we would have a huge library of information, accessible all over the world - like a world unity library. But I have just spent days, no weeks, reading and re-reading up more and more facts about SEO and what you should do and not do.

And as one looks at all the other sites ahead of one's own site in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), (see! I can't even speak without techno-jabber anymore) not only is one kind of depressed (because those top pages are not always the best pages of information one is searching for) but one has to wonder if all the hard, genuine work one has put into one's own site is ever going to be "up there" .. and equally depressing is the realization that one has to play this SEO-game.

In the real world, the "rich get richer". On the Internet, it has become the SEO-savvy gets higher. And the price of all that? Not only do we have a lot of junk and rubbish on the internet (which is not the fault of the SEO practitioners) but now, one is tweaking and re-tweaking one's own pages so that it has enough keyword density, that the keywords should be the first letter in the title of the article, that we should name our files like our keywords, that we should beg others to link to us for PR (Page Rank) reasons, that we cannot just write naturally anymore if we ever want to be read by anyone! Geez, has the world gone mad?

Those of us who want to get top rankings in the SERPs (and we are in the millions if not billions), we spend our time tweaking our on-page factors, researching the most popular keywords (that hopefully but usually fruitlessly also have low supply) and that have respectable to high KEIs, submitting to search engines and directories, installing gadgets, contributions, add-ons, and tools to improve, measure our link popularity, our competitor's rankings, their linking partners. And this is just the tip of the techno-mad ice berg.

Once I thought it would be wonderful to be able to access relevant information, to contribute well researched data and articles, to provide cogent alternative viewpoints. Now I am wondering, who has time for all this when we need to spend so much time tweaking not our information or the relevance and coherence of what we have to say, but answering the increasingly hard question of "will the search engines (SEs) like my page/site?" So how much of the "useful" information on the net is going to be good anymore. What about all those articles and resources that could have been not just good, but great? Now they are spending so much time and effort to climb the slippery slope of SERPs positioning ladder that surely they can only spend a fraction of their research and writing time on producing illuminating information.

Imagine if Shakespeare or Thoreau had to worry, while they are writing about if they had enough keywords in their pages. And maybe they should not mark their pages as 1,2,3s... but by some keywords that can be found. And do they have enough other authors linking to them so that their books can be found? Just like the advice these days is if you are getting a domain, it is preferable if you could get a domain that has relevant keyword(s) in the domain name. Maybe Shakespeare would have had to spend his time, not writing his brilliant plays but changing his name to some highly sought keyword so that he could be searched and found.

I am not blaming the SEs like the mammoth Google. Of course not. They may be the progenitors of our current SEO madness but their intentions were "pure" - they wanted to produce more relevant results for users like you and me. But as they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". We have millions of webmasters, editors, SEO experts, and over-worked stall owners now trying to guess how Google judges sites and their content and then trying to manipulate their sites according to best guess. But of course, the ever helpful caveat also adds spice to the madness: Google changes its rules from time to time!

Fortunately or unfortunately, we have to play by the rules that the big boys lay down coz that is the only game in town. (Not that those rules are all that clear.) It would be wonderful, as a Google-Yahoo-Search Engine user if we could have the ability to just "delete" sites we don't want from our search results. That would be a way of filtering out all those useless gateway, cloaking and spam sites that causes our big gun search engines to work so hard at their algorithms. If we as users could ourselves just click a tickbox or button next to each site we don't ever want to see in our search results, then over time, the results we would get would become more and more relevant for us. Instead of a gazillion useless pages, we could cull some of them for ourselves. It would save the SEs some work and over time, the worldwide democratic process would actually determine which sites are generally considered useless and those would drop down to the bottom SERP pages or hopefully just disappear.