|
 |
 |
Webmasters and
content providers began optimizing sites for
search engines in the mid-1990s, as the
first search engines were cataloging the
early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed
to do was submit a page, or URL, to the
various engines which would send a spider to
crawl that page, extract links to other
pages from it, and return information found
on the page to be indexed. The process
involves a search engine spider downloading
a page and storing it on the search engine's
own server, where a second program, known as
an indexer, extracts various information
about the page, such as the words it
contains and where these are located, as
well as any weight for specific words and
all links the page contains, which are then
placed into a scheduler for crawling at a
later date. |
search engines
recognized that some webmasters were making
efforts to rank well in their search
engines, and even manipulating the page
rankings in search results. Early search
engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their
algorithms to prevent webmasters from
manipulating rankings by stuffing pages with
excessive or irrelevant keywords
SEO
companies that employ overly aggressive
techniques can get their client websites
banned from the search results. The Wall
Street Journal profiled a company,
Traffic Power, which allegedly used
high-risk techniques and failed to
disclose those risks to its clients.
Wired magazine reported that the same
company sued blogger Aaron Wall for
writing about the ban.Google's Matt
Cutts later confirmed that Google did in
fact ban Traffic Power and some of its
clients. |
|
|
|