[jcl]

At the end of the day, though, people want quality. If a low-quality SEOed article appears higher in the search rankings than a high-quality article, it is a flaw in ranking algorithm -- a weakness that other search engines can exploit.

I think Google is smart enough to realize that search dominance is their most valuable asset... that the money from search dominance dwarfs the money from favoring crappy content that matches ad keywords. This is just another step in the struggle between Google and the search engine optimizers.

(The deal between Demand and YouTube is curious, though... If the "real world" worked like that, prime time television would be filled with shows about cars, beverages, and pills.)