Search engine optimization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:54, 24 February 2003

Revision as of 01:05, 25 February 2003

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==Controversy==

As the industry developed, search engines quickly became wary of unscrupulous [[SEO]] firms that attempted to generate traffic for their customers at any cost. One frequent practice, called keyword spamming, involved the insertion of random text at the bottom of a webpage, colored to match the background of the page. The inserted text usually included words that were frequently searchessearched (such as sex), with the goal of getting rankings, and thus access to large streams of traffic.

The search engines responded with a continuous series of countermeasures, designed to filter out the "noise" generated by these artificial techniques. In turn, several SEO firms developed ever-more-subtle techniques to influence rankings.