Gordon Weakliem explains why SEO outfits exist - it's the utterly opaque nature of Google's system, and their dominance of it:

In fact, that's the problem with search. It's like a FICO score: it's critical, yet totally opaque in the interest of maintaning proprietary intellectual property. A wonderful situation for the holder of a monopoly, less so for people interested in legitimately figuring out how to optimize the algorithm. The fact is that for many online businesses, search engine traffic is life or death. It's one thing to build up good PageRank and generate huge traffic for a personal weblog; it's something else entirely to turn that into revenue. And it's another thing entirely to get to that point and then agonize over technological decisions for fear of losing your search engine goodness. Who wants to put their revenue stream at risk?

I understand why Google hides their process from view; partly it's a matter of not letting the competition catch up through replication, but - the larger issue, I think, is the fact that scammers would just go to town exploiting it. It's a situation that leads to the kind of "SEO expert" wilderness that Gordon describes.

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