True, but you can have truly wonderful websites that do not know anything about seo and fail to even be indexed.
So some SEO knowledge is assumed by the search engines. Google webmaster is there to educate webmasters about how to design sites that the bots will index properly. And there is additional information to befound more and more frequently, google is actually working hard to communicate to webmasters what is right and what is wrong with their sites by making all sorts of tools available.
These things also tell you in a way what changes have occured in the algorithm – for instance the addition of warnings if your meta tags descriptions are too long or too short indicates a move back to meta tags as a method of sorting sites.
Following google’s SEO instructions and using tactics to fool google are two different things and cannot really both be called SEO. But they are and that causes wide spread confusion and allows some so-called SEO experts to lead webmasters following their advice into doom.
Agreed, google NEEDS to improve results. Where you used to find sites that offer products and have helpful descriptions and verbal comparisons, all I see anymore is ebay and price comparison or discount sites. The quality sites have disappeared from the top results. The trouble is, any experiment meant to improve results for users can ruin any number of innocent businesses.
Be that as it may, google is god and can make or break any business with a key stroke. It is at best an imperfect system, and it leaves many innocent victims in it’s wake. It would be a lot better if google didn’t rule by such a large margin.