The Outbreak of War

As with most things that involve commercial or financial gains, the practises of Search Engine Optimisation soon took a sinister turn. The importance of optimising a website so that it ranked highly in the SERPS meant that some people began using dubious techniques to trick the search engines. There are many of these dubious 'spamming' techniques such as:

* Huge lists of keywords

* Using keywords that are commonly searched for but irrelevant to a particular website

* Adding long lists of words that are invisible to most website visitors but readable by the search engines

The search engines soon caught on to these spam practises and they weren't happy. The main aim of a search engine is to make money usually through advertising. In order to do this it needs to get huge numbers of people to use its search engine services. The only way to encourage people to continue to use these services is if the SERPS provide links to useful, relevant sites. It is therefore within a search engines interests to ensure that the results within its SERPS are as accurate as possible. The spamming of search engines forced them to improve the algorithms they use to determine where in the SERPS a particular site would rank. These new algorithms included calculations to defend against the spam SEO practises and in some cases websites practising certain spam SEO techniques were black-listed and excluded completely from the SERPS.

Of course, the dubious practitioners of spam SEO techniques soon came up with new ways to trick the system, and so the war between spam SEO practitioners and the search engines began.

The increased complexity of search engine algorithms also meant that the legitimate side of Search Engine Optimisation became more complex and SEO became a growing industry in itself.

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