Facts, Fiction and views by valuepitchers

By the year 1997, the realisation that efforts were being put in by webmasters to improve their ranking on the search engines had dawned upon every search engine, even if these attempts involved manipulations in the rankings of the pages of search results.



Infoseek and other early search engines adjusted their page ranking algorithms in order to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from painting a rosy picture about the ranking of each search results page merely by filling each page with too many keywords that were not relevant.



It is because of the high value (from the point of view of marketing) of the targeted search results that the chances of the relationship between the search engines and the search engine optimisers souring are higher.



In the year 2005, AIRWeb (or Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web), a conference that is held every year, was created. The purpose of this annual conference was to discuss the ill-effects of providing content aggressively on the web and also to find solutions to these problems.



The client websites of search engine optimisation firms which use very aggressive methods to optimise search engines are liable to be banned from the pages of search results. In the year 2005, a company called Traffic Power was profiled in an issue of the Wall Street Journal. This firm allegedly used highly risky means and did not disclose the risks to its clients. According to a report that appeared in Wired, Traffic Power filed a lawsuit against Aaron Wall, a blogger, for his post about the ban. Matt Cutts of Google later confirmed that Traffic Power, as well as some of its clients, were, in fact, banned by Google.



Several search engines have, in fact, reached out to the search engine optimisation industry. They frequently sponsor and attend conferences and seminars on search engine optimisation. With the advent of paid inclusion, many search engines actively participate in the well-being of the optimisation industry.



Some search engines also provide information to and guide websites with instructions about website optimisation. Google has launched a program called Sitemaps. This helps webmasters understand the problems faced by Google in indexing their website. It also provides information about the traffic from Google to their website.



Yahoo!, on the other hand, has a program called Yahoo! Site Explorer, which provides the webmasters away to submit uniform resource locators (URL), to determine the number of pages in the Yahoo! Index and to view information about links.