Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and every other search engine in fact, use complicated and convoluted algorithms to rank websites in the order that they appear in search results when any user enters a search query. However, until very recently, there was a very fatal flaw in these algorithms. It seems obvious that a website should be ranked higher than others if it has a lot more content that is relevant to the search query. One of the main measures of this relevancy to the term that was searched, was keyword density and the HTML “meta” keywords tag. As more and more search engines emerged and started to become popular, they attracted millions of searches. In 2012, Google recorded a total of 1,873,910,000,000 searches. That’s a lot of commas.
Unquestionably, as search engines grow in popularity, the value of being at the top of specific searches became very enticing to businesses. This led to the establishment of a black-hat Search Engine Optimization world focused on creating strategies to help websites cheat their way to the top of search rankings. The most popular such website is http://www.blackhatworld.com/.
It became very normal to see websites making endless amounts of pages that contained only keywords and keyword-stuffed “meta” tags. This obvious spam led to unrelated spam websites ranking near the very top of Google. They knew something had to be changed.
Over the years, the Google search algorithm has become far more complicated than it once was and is now the internet giant’ secretly guarded recipe. Many more metrics are accounted for now, including incoming links to the website, social media presence and user trust in the website. However, the question still remains: has SPAM been eliminated?
With the stakes so high (billions of searches every single day), there is very large incentive for businesses to cheat their way to the top of Google’s rankings. One of these strategies include spam link-building in which the website collects millions of incoming links from completely spam websites that serve no other purpose. Having had experience in the industry this past summer during my internship, I can say that spam has definitely not been eliminated and the world of Search Engine Marketing is a rapidly changing one. As more and more people become dependent on search engines, I expect further amendments to these algorithms to root out spam and unwanted content.
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