Background:

Since the first day of the first search engine, people have been trying to get top rankings for their websites in order to capture eyeballs and sell products, services, and advertising (for other products and services,and so on).

Search Engines were fundamentally different than basic web directories as they actively sought out and listed content on the web using software that bounced around following links and indexing the content it found back in the parent listing. And so enterprising web entrepreneurs quickly figured out that loading up their websites with content that attracted the search engine spiders garnered higher search engine results (“SERPS”, or Search Engine Results Page(S)).

Black Hat SEO Emerges:

A wave of software was developed that automated the creation of large blocks of keyword-filled text as well as other software that generally attempted to take shortcuts to gaining high SEO rankings. Known as "Black Hat SEO", those who adopted it quickly dominated search engine listings and raked in big contracts from advertising – creating a model that proved unsustainable as the market crashed in 2001 with millions paid out in advertising models based on roughly $30 per CPM that put many early e-business .com’s out of business.

The Search Engine Strikes Back:

And so initial search engines quickly became a repository of sites that contained nothing but pages loaded with unintelligible text and links – a tactic quickly addressed by the new wave of search engines such as Google and Bing. Content had to be unique and coherent, and a new critical factor was added to the SERPS equation– linkbacks. Essentially the idea is that Search Engine spiders track the number of links a website receives from other authoritative websites and weights their search engine results according to variables within this statistic such as the keywords, content, and page-rank of the linking site.

When the core search algorithms were first updated, webmasters who had spent tens of thousands of dollars building networks of sites based on keyword saturation saw their traffic sources dry up over night and literally had to start over from scratch. But those who had actually built informative websites with valuable content saw their rankings surge dramatically – particularly those who had established a reputation amongst more prominent sites as being expert in their respective markets and had links from those sites to their content.

Return of the Webmaster:

Webmasters of course developed software to automate the creation of websites with these reciprocal links, creating “webrings” of sites containing links to each other, plenty of keywords, but again, no real content. And Search Engines responded accordingly – by improving their metrics to devalue “two-way-links” and employing physical people to monitor and evaluate content. And again, those who had invested heavily in a webring network structure saw their traffic rates drop instantly each time a new update to a major search engine defused their SEO “tricks”. Just as before, those with real valuable information and a reputation in the web community saw their search engine rankings improve steadily.

"Page Activity" - The New Frontier:

In the most recent round of apparent Google SERPS shakeup –a new metric seems to have emerged that tracks some level of “activity” within a given website. This roughly equates to having users comments, upload photos, write new articles, and generally visit and participate on a site. Webmasters then developed more blackhat SEO software such as Xrumer to automate the posting of comments to their blogs and to other websites.

And Google seems to have struck back with Google sees a site’s backlinks go way up but with no real traffic or activity on the site, it may penalize or otherwise call the site up for review. Many webmasters claim that Xrumer and ScrapeBox are still very effective at building linkbacks to their sites quickly, though some have started to complain that these tools are becoming less effective as Google reacts to devalue certain sites that are typically the targets of these automated linkback generators.

Conclusions:

The lesson to learn from all of this is that there is certainly an ongoing power struggle between black-hat webmasters and major search engine operators over the tools and tactics used to create and promote sites with high search engine rankings. Serious webmasters that can afford to play a numbers game involving hundreds or thousands of websites will hedge their bets for any automation strategies by applying them to only a portion of their network, or using these techniques sparingly and in doses that will go undetected by the Search Engine auditors but they then amplify the effects of these SEO techniques across large platforms of sites.

For single business website owners this can give us some valuable lessons:

• Lesson 1: The only lasting ROI for SEO is to build valuable content on your site, and then promote it by creating linkbacks that add value to the sites on which they are posted.
• Lesson 2: Blackhat SEO tricks can and do produce effective results but these are always short-lived and will ultimately be vetted out by Search Engines which cause you to lose your entire SEO investment and have to start over or make major adjustments to your SEO strategy.
• Lesson 3: If you outsource SEO, you should be fully aware of the SEO tactics utilized by your contracted SEO company and understand how these might adversely affect your search engine ranking.