More and more people are "understanding" how SEO works and they're simply manipulating it. By ranking early for a keyword that has yet to gain popularity, they stand a chance at getting a lot of traffic for a short period of time, early on. One can assume this is to earn ad revenue from the traffic but it's obviously not a sustainable method as the more reputable sites will gain favorable rankings quickly. These are the same people that will earn 100's of $$ from their website per month, and sell it on Flippa.com for 6-12x their monthly income. Then they build a new site, and repeat.
I am currently working in the automotive distribution industry, and pretty much any automotive site you find is using this method of maniplation. It sucks.
An example; Just type in 2014 BMW 3 Series, 2015 BMW 3 Series and 2016 BMW 3 Series to see people using this method of maniplation.
As SEO is blamed, so one could also blame the existance of search engines themselves. What this really has to do with is "meeting consumer demand."
It just happens, not by coincidence, that there is a lot less competition in areas where the end product doesn't actually exist.
Last month I tried to reverse look up a phone number with Intelius. They tried to upsell me a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and then told me the phone number wasn't actually in their system but they would look for it. I was to expect an answer in 3 days. 9 days later they said they couldn't find it and refunded my charge.
Intelius knew they wouldn't be able to have that number. But, they knew there was an X% chance I'd sign up for their monthly recurring service; something I suspect would not have been refunded.
There are plenty of other businesses making money selling things that don't exist. Some are arguably legitimate, such as Kickstarter. Others, such as pyramid schemes, are quite less so.
In my opinion, you're not entirely wrong nor are you right.
For one, I don't think that ranking for 2015 BMW 3 Series (my former example) is meeting any demand. The car does not even exist yet; I'm not even sure if BMW would even be working on it at the moment. How can that be meeting demand?
The example you gave with intelius is not entirely wrong persay; as they did "try" to perform a valuable service in the end. However, what if a random nefarious individual started ranking for non-existant phone numbers, took your money, and ran?
Gamification of SEO is a slippery slope. Sometimes it's useful and other times it goes horribly wrong. It comes down human intentions and search engine sorting out the good vs the bad, I guess. I have not yet known a machine to determine human intention.
It doesn't really matter whether intent can be divined, because perverse incentives can be engineered out of the system if the resources and will are present.
Did Intelius "try," or did they get free 9 day loan?
There ARE valid ways to create content to satisfy these searches...
Someone who searches "2014 BMW 3 Series" is probably trying to find out what the product roadmap for 3 series BMW's looks like. They're asking, "Should I buy now, or are there any cool features I should wait for?"
What's the right content to deliver them? Here's a novel idea... Answer their fracking question... provide the product roadmap (as much as possible). Summarize the grapevine/rumors... Analyze the history of product releases and competition and make some intelligent guesses. Does BMW have a history of making major changes in even years? Tell the people.
All of that kind of content has the right to exist, rank, and produce income for its creator.
The real problem is that there's no good content being created for these queries because the people who "get it" (i.e. produce content that consumers want, not just that you FEEL like) don't command the editorial resources within legitimate/authoritative news/content organizations.
More and more people are "understanding" how SEO works and they're simply manipulating it. By ranking early for a keyword that has yet to gain popularity, they stand a chance at getting a lot of traffic for a short period of time, early on. One can assume this is to earn ad revenue from the traffic but it's obviously not a sustainable method as the more reputable sites will gain favorable rankings quickly. These are the same people that will earn 100's of $$ from their website per month, and sell it on Flippa.com for 6-12x their monthly income. Then they build a new site, and repeat.
I am currently working in the automotive distribution industry, and pretty much any automotive site you find is using this method of maniplation. It sucks.
An example; Just type in 2014 BMW 3 Series, 2015 BMW 3 Series and 2016 BMW 3 Series to see people using this method of maniplation.