SEO: Divining Its Future From The Past

In the beginning – there were web pages. They were simple and straight forward and just needed a way for potential visitors to find them.

In the near beginning – there were the simple search engines. These programs would index the pages or URLs that were submitted to them. These search engines "spidered" or "crawled" the page and extracted various information that they deemed necessary to determine the relevance of the page.

In the beginning after that – webmasters began to realize that there were certain things they could do to manipulate the search engine results by faking their own relevancy.

The reason this was possible (and relatively simple) was because these early search engines based their results almost entirely on information that webmasters could easily control, change, and manipulate on their side. From this, the first forms of White-Hat and Black-Hat SEO made their appearance (though they weren't called that in the early days, of course). These early techniques could be called spamming, or, if you wanted to be a little more accurate, they could be called dirty rotten tricks that did nothing but pollute your chances of ever finding what you actually wanted.

Some of these tricks included stuffing the meta tags with keywords, and often unrelated keywords (ever wonder why gambling or adult sites would show up when you were looking for cross stitch patterns?), or hiding keywords on the page or using questionable redirects.

Search engines began to evolve to combat these attempts at manipulation, some people even developed algorithms to determine the relevancy of a given site.

In the beginning – of algorithmic search engines – things started to look a little better. Results were more relevant and it was harder for webmasters to manipulate their rankings.

But not impossible.

Slowly those same unethical SEOs began to discover ways to artificially build their rankings. Link farms, link spamming, and link purchasing, all emerged as methods to unnaturally raise their rankings. And once again the search engines changed, developed, and evolved their algorithms to protect their natural search results.

Not all was bad though. Overly aggressive SEO firms were punished, if not banned, but SEO companies that practiced ethical techniques became an unexpected ally. The thing is, a search engine's livelihood is determined by its ability to provide relevant results. So the search engine optimization firms who included relevant content as a major part of their strategies became very useful to the search engines.

In the present – unethical practices still exist. Everyone is looking for the "quick fix" solution and keep turning to Black-Hat practices despite the historical precedents. Everyone wants to believe they can outsmart the search engines simply because they lack the patience or ability to do it the right way.

And things have begun to turn even nastier than before. Some companies are no longer content to simply cheat their own way up the ladder, but fell the need to try and pull others down. This has come to be termed "Negative SEO" and includes practices like Google Bowling and false copyright complaints.

And once again, the search engines will adapt to compensate for this kind of behavior.

In the future – will we see an end to this behavior? Unlikely. Closing a door somewhere always seems to open another somewhere else. And in the intensely competitive online world, everyone is always on the lookout for a way to get the leg up.

Just remember: history has shown us that sometimes having the leg up just means that its easier to knock you over. And, if you've employed questionable SEO to get that leg up – in other words, not maintaining your balance – the search engines won't hesitate to start pushing.

Hard.