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SEO and Search Engine Articles |
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Relationship
between SEO and search engines
The first
mentions of Search Engine Optimization do not appear on Usenet until
1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search
engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that
some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank
well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page
rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as
Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of
the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a
URL to instantly index and rank that page.
Due to the high
value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an
adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005,
an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging
the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive
web content providers.
Some more
aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ
techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search
engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell
services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms
that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate,
lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client
websites.
Some SEO
companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client
websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal
profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and
failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the
same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned.
Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban
Traffic Power and some of its clients.
Some search
engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent
sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with
the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested
interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the
main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site
optimization: Google's, Yahoo!'s, MSN's and Ask.com's. Google has a
Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any
problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google
traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way
to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many
pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep
pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for
qualifying Google Advertising Professionals
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