This is true. But there really are hundreds of thousands (probably millions and millions) of sites that are structured horribly where you can simply rely on knowing how the heck to structure a page correctly.
For instance...
I recently moved a corporate site for a major national law firm from Joomla to WordPress. They had 200+ pages with multiple H1 tags, nearly 300 pages missing descriptions, dozens and dozens of soft 404s, hundreds of pages with bad titles or URLs that are too long, dozens of pages with duplicate content because of bad sitemaps, and every single page was over 100 links because of the dummy that made the original nav toolbar put every subpage in there.
White hats can work for the next decade simply trying to save companies from themselves, their stupid CMS systems, and former well meaning SEO efforts that are now banned or deprecated.
Short term effect to fixing these issues? A nearly 20% increase in traffic since the switchover and slightly raised ranking for related firm content on OTHER sites.
For instance...
I recently moved a corporate site for a major national law firm from Joomla to WordPress. They had 200+ pages with multiple H1 tags, nearly 300 pages missing descriptions, dozens and dozens of soft 404s, hundreds of pages with bad titles or URLs that are too long, dozens of pages with duplicate content because of bad sitemaps, and every single page was over 100 links because of the dummy that made the original nav toolbar put every subpage in there.
White hats can work for the next decade simply trying to save companies from themselves, their stupid CMS systems, and former well meaning SEO efforts that are now banned or deprecated.
Short term effect to fixing these issues? A nearly 20% increase in traffic since the switchover and slightly raised ranking for related firm content on OTHER sites.