The relationship between SEO and the
search engines
The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don't 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 #1 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 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.
Google has enforced webpage restrictions for years, such as for
hidden-text (background & foreground colors exactly the same hue);
in 2006, Google could punish a non-standard website by blocking
search-results, automatically, the next day for 30-35 days (or longer),
pending a reinstatement request, and if reinstated, revert the index to
old/expired/deleted webpages from a year earlier, delaying the
re-indexing of the current website for a total of 2-4 months.
Yahoo & MSN Search do not automatically punish entire websites for
small amounts of accidental hidden text. Not surprisingly, Google's
market share of daily searches has fallen rapidly from 75% to 56% over
the past few years, as other search engines find many valuable webpages
that Google has banned & cannot display due to Google's severely
limited index. In early 2006, MSN Search typically re-indexed small
websites every 14 days, and Yahoo also re-indexed quickly, much faster
than Google, but all 3 MSN/Yahoo/Google could require more than a month
to index a new page (new file name) on an old website.
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, and MSN's. Google has a Sitemaps
program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems
indexing their website and also provides an invaluable amount of data
on Google traffic to your website. Yahoo! has SiteExplorer 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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