[ricardo81]

Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.

The "fiddle with H1" or "write X amount of words" or "buy Y number of links with a % of anchor text" is silly.

[tomcooks]

> Some of the technical SEO is good though, like simply making the page crawlable and content being in a logical order.

Semantic HTML has been created to help screen readers and browsers understand content organization, it having been hijacked by SE is just a side-effect.

[ricardo81]

The point I was meaning to make is that it's quite easy to make a site uncrawlable, and therefore unfindable in search engines.

e.g. Google always had problems indexing Flash websites. It historically had issues with sites heavily relying on Javascript. Nowadays it's less of a problem, at least for Googlebot.

[dspillett]

Though a useful side effect of SEO people finding it to be a useful side effect, is that what they are doing for their gain may help overall accessibility (where too often the opposite is the case, when people trying to game systems accidentally affect accessibility, it is usually negatively).

[lvncelot]

Yes, but even for those, it means that we are left to hope that what's good for a crawler and what's good for e.g. a screen-reader will still align in the future. Right now it feels almost coincidental.