The job of a good search engine is to return the best possible results for the user. What Google did was tell content creators some of the signals they use to rank pages.<p>Some of these content creators used and abused this and got better rankings. I see many fake sites built just to link to one site, people asking for or buying links (like in the case of rap genius but which we don't hear about) and other tricks to get good rankings.<p>Wouldn't it had been better not to give such power to content creators and just tell them to build good content that people want to read?
Mostly Google does tell people to create good content, but there are still swarms of SEOers who will try to reverse-engineer Google's algorithms regardless of how much or little information Google releases.