Beating the Google search: a brief history
By Rhys Blakely
For as long as there have been internet search engines, there have been
people dedicated to manipulating their results Now, with businesses aware
that the difference between appearing in the first or tenth spots on a site
such as Google can spell the difference between business success and
disaster, the process has exploded into a full-blown industry.
The first "search engine optimisation" techniques, designed to boost the
profile of a website by improving its ranking on a list of results, date
back to the mid-1990s and the development of the first search engines.
Some of these earliest techniques involved "meta tags" - invisible labels
added, usually by hand, to web pages by their creators, ostensibly to act as
a guide to a page's content.
These tags could be picked up by search engines which used them to identify
relevant websites. It was just as quickly realised that they could be added
to a certain site to distort search results.
However, as the web became larger, meta tags became a less efficient way of
identifying useful pages.
Google revolutionised the way search engines seek and sift web pages and
their content. The company's "PageRank" system factored in the number of
incoming links on a certain page. The more incoming links a page has, the
more popular - and relevant - it is likely to be. Moreover, not all links
are treated equally - the "value" assigned to each incoming link depends on
the number of incoming links on the page it comes from.
That system kept the manipulation of search results in check for a time. But
soon a market developed in the buying and selling of links, which enabled
website owners to boost the rankings of their sites.
In response, Google and other search engines have turned to other so-called
"off-site" measures of a page's relevancy to determine how prominently it
should be displayed in a set of results. Most of these are kept highly
secret - in part to deter would be "optimisers".
However, there still exist several methods of boosting a site's popularity
which are widely considered unethical - or "black hat".
"Link spammers" trade in links to sites. Some have created programs that
automatically create false posts on message boards which link through to a
target page.
"Keyword spam" involves a webmaster cramming a page with "hidden" terms,
picked to fool search engines into thinking it is more interesting than it
really is. BMW allegedly wrote "gebrauchtwagen" (used car) 42 times on its
gateway page for new car sales in a bid to attract surfers interested in
used cars. The move led to it being blacklisted by Google.
"Spamdexers" boost pages through the manipulation of the complex algorithms
used by search engines to rank sites. These algorithms - the mathematical
formulas which dictate where pages appear in a list of search results - rest
at the heart of search engines such as Google's.
"Cloakers" seek to fool search engines so that their users are directed to
pages they did no expect to see. For example, a company could use this
technique to make its own site appear under a competitor's brand name on a
page of search results. When unwitting surfers click through, they find
themselves diverted to a rival of the company they were originally searching
for.
"Google-aters" construct pages solely to appear high up the Google search
engine. Often these pages use every trick open to their creators and link
through to the actual target site, which will be more conventionally
constructed.
"Google bombs" are a type of page manipulated or constructed to appear when
certain keywords are typed into the Google search engine. According to
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, the first Google bomb to catch the
interest of the wider online public probably occurred accidentally in 1999,
when users discovered that the query "more evil than Satan" returned the
home page of Microsoft, Google's arch rival. It has never been shown that
this was done by Google deliberately.
source: business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2027553,00.html