This is an accepted version of this page
75-544: Search engine optimization ( SEO ) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines . SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or " organic " results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic . Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search , video search , academic search , news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work,
150-691: A business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's search engine ranking, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt , in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day. It is considered a wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO. Optimization techniques are highly tuned to
225-430: A campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts , a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any no follow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As
300-772: A claim upon which relief may be granted." In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit, and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ( San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses. Web traffic Web traffic
375-432: A higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer. Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags , headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid
450-601: A new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique. The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under
525-405: A paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click ; however, this practice was discontinued in 2009. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled. Mobile devices are used for
600-400: A practice known as SEO, is as important as the website itself. Too much web traffic can dramatically slow down or prevent all access to a website. This is caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle and may be an intentional attack on the site or simply caused by over-popularity. Large-scale websites with numerous servers can often cope with the traffic required, and it
675-433: A probabilistic sense, many of these tree-search methods are guaranteed to find the exact or optimal solution, if given enough time. This is called " completeness ". Another important sub-class consists of algorithms for exploring the game tree of multiple-player games, such as chess or backgammon , whose nodes consist of all possible game situations that could result from the current situation. The goal in these problems
750-417: A result of this change, the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes , Flash , and JavaScript. In December 2009, Google announced it would be using
825-427: A search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank , is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links . PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as
SECTION 10
#1732766176008900-685: A search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish to crawl. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam. In 2020, Google sunsetted
975-507: A shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile local search . In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016, where they analyzed 2.5 million websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device. Google has been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console ,
1050-420: A site and want to stay once they find it. When people bounce off a site, it counts against the site and affects its credibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to
1125-443: A sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status. In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies. In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University , Larry Page and Sergey Brin , developed "Backrub",
1200-492: A web page's metadata, including the title tag and meta description , will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using the canonical link element or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count towards the page's link popularity score. These are known as incoming links, which point to
1275-462: A web traffic overload. A news item in the media , a quickly propagating email , or a link from a popular site may cause such a boost in visitors (sometimes called a flash crowd or the Slashdot effect). Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated in 2014 that around one third of Web traffic is generated by Internet bots and malware . According to Mozilla since January 2017, more than half of
1350-441: A webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals. Since
1425-584: Is applicable when the search space is not limited and all aspects of the given network are available to the entity running the search algorithm. This class also includes various tree search algorithms , that view the elements as vertices of a tree , and traverse that tree in some special order. Examples of the latter include the exhaustive methods such as depth-first search and breadth-first search , as well as various heuristic-based search tree pruning methods such as backtracking and branch and bound . Unlike general metaheuristics, which at best work only in
1500-473: Is more likely that smaller services are affected by traffic overload. Sudden traffic load may also hang your server or may result in a shutdown of your services. Denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks) have forced websites to close after a malicious attack, flooding the site with more requests than it could cope with. Viruses have also been used to coordinate large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks. A sudden burst of publicity may accidentally cause
1575-521: Is possible to see shortcomings of the site and look to improve those areas. It is also possible to increase the popularity of a site and the number of people that visit it. It is sometimes important to protect some parts of a site by password, allowing only authorized people to visit particular sections or pages. Some site administrators have chosen to block their page to specific traffic, such as by geographic location. The re-election campaign site for U.S. President George W. Bush ( GeorgeWBush.com )
SECTION 20
#17327661760081650-413: Is the data sent and received by visitors to a website . Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic . Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic, and
1725-419: Is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website. In a commercial context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives of Internet marketing initiatives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. The amount of traffic seen by a website is a measure of its popularity. By analyzing the statistics of visitors, it
1800-409: Is the ongoing practice of optimizing a website to help improve its rankings in the search engines. Several internal and external factors are involved which can help improve a site's listing within the search engines. The higher a site ranks within the search engines for a particular keyword, the more traffic it will receive. Web traffic can be increased by the placement of a site in search engines and
1875-427: Is to find the move that provides the best chance of a win, taking into account all possible moves of the opponent(s). Similar problems occur when humans or machines have to make successive decisions whose outcomes are not entirely under one's control, such as in robot guidance or in marketing , financial , or military strategy planning. This kind of problem — combinatorial search — has been extensively studied in
1950-399: Is typically used when the goal is to find a sub-structure with a maximum (or minimum) value of some parameter. (Since the sub-structure is usually represented in the computer by a set of integer variables with constraints, these problems can be viewed as special cases of constraint satisfaction or discrete optimization; but they are usually formulated and solved in a more abstract setting where
2025-822: The Search Engine Results Page . The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ , two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Search Console , for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console. Yahoo! formerly operated
2100-617: The local search methods, that view the elements of the search space as the vertices of a graph, with edges defined by a set of heuristics applicable to the case; and scan the space by moving from item to item along the edges, for example according to the steepest descent or best-first criterion, or in a stochastic search . This category includes a great variety of general metaheuristic methods, such as simulated annealing , tabu search , A-teams, and genetic programming , that combine arbitrary heuristics in specific ways. The opposite of local search would be global search methods. This method
2175-704: The search space of a problem domain, with either discrete or continuous values . Although search engines use search algorithms, they belong to the study of information retrieval , not algorithmics. The appropriate search algorithm to use often depends on the data structure being searched, and may also include prior knowledge about the data. Search algorithms can be made faster or more efficient by specially constructed database structures, such as search trees , hash maps , and database indexes . Search algorithms can be classified based on their mechanism of searching into three types of algorithms: linear, binary, and hashing. Linear search algorithms check every record for
2250-633: The string searching algorithms , that search for patterns within strings. Two famous examples are the Boyer–Moore and Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithms , and several algorithms based on the suffix tree data structure. In 1953, American statistician Jack Kiefer devised Fibonacci search which can be used to find the maximum of a unimodal function and has many other applications in computer science. There are also search methods designed for quantum computers , like Grover's algorithm , that are theoretically faster than linear or brute-force search even without
2325-497: The Czech Republic, where respectively Baidu , Yahoo! Japan , Naver , Yandex and Seznam are market leaders. Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address . Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially
Search engine optimization - Misplaced Pages Continue
2400-557: The Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are. The closer the keywords are together their ranking will improve based on key terms. SEO may generate an adequate return on investment . However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantee and uncertainty,
2475-470: The SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit
2550-471: The URL and can count towards the page link's popularity score, impacting the credibility of a website. SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). Search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing . Industry commentators have classified these methods and
2625-631: The US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise . That market share is achieved in a number of countries. As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable example markets are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and
2700-403: The US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users. In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in
2775-492: The Web traffic is encrypted with HTTPS . Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP , and it secures information and data transfer between a user's browser and a website. Search algorithm In computer science , a search algorithm is an algorithm designed to solve a search problem . Search algorithms work to retrieve information stored within particular data structure , or calculated in
2850-545: The announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version. In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident
2925-419: The background, in an invisible div , or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking . Another category sometimes used is grey hat SEO . This is in between the black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid the site being penalized but do not act in producing
3000-402: The best content for users. Grey hat SEO is entirely focused on improving search engine rankings. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black or grey hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual site review. One example
3075-532: The computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers. Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in
Search engine optimization - Misplaced Pages Continue
3150-452: The context of artificial intelligence . Examples of algorithms for this class are the minimax algorithm , alpha–beta pruning , and the A* algorithm and its variants. The name "combinatorial search" is generally used for algorithms that look for a specific sub-structure of a given discrete structure , such as a graph, a string , a finite group , and so on. The term combinatorial optimization
3225-747: The creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming . By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. The leading search engines, Google, Bing , and Yahoo , do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and have shared their personal opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines. In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. In 2007, Google announced
3300-519: The dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in
3375-439: The gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth . Not all web traffic is welcomed. Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site. Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on search engines and through search engine optimization . Web analytics
3450-441: The goal is to find a variable assignment that will maximize or minimize a certain function of those variables. Algorithms for these problems include the basic brute-force search (also called "naïve" or "uninformed" search), and a variety of heuristics that try to exploit partial knowledge about the structure of this space, such as linear relaxation, constraint generation, and constraint propagation . An important subclass are
3525-413: The impact would be minor. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> ). When
3600-457: The internal representation is not explicitly mentioned.) An important and extensively studied subclass are the graph algorithms , in particular graph traversal algorithms, for finding specific sub-structures in a given graph — such as subgraphs , paths , circuits, and so on. Examples include Dijkstra's algorithm , Kruskal's algorithm , the nearest neighbour algorithm , and Prim's algorithm . Another important subclass of this category are
3675-513: The kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game , webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms , involved
3750-471: The leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results. In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented
3825-406: The major search engines has developed a unique algorithm to determine where websites are placed within the search results. When a user clicks on one of the listings in the search results, they are directed to the corresponding website and data is transferred from the website's server, thus counting the visitors towards the overall flow of traffic to that website. Search engine optimization (SEO),
SECTION 50
#17327661760083900-406: The majority of Google searches. In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way they are crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index. In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of
3975-415: The mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web . Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or URL , to the various engines, which would send a web crawler 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/crawler crawls a page and storing it on
4050-598: The newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words. With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors. In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in
4125-446: The one associated with a target key in a linear fashion. Binary, or half-interval, searches repeatedly target the center of the search structure and divide the search space in half. Comparison search algorithms improve on linear searching by successively eliminating records based on comparisons of the keys until the target record is found, and can be applied on data structures with a defined order. Digital search algorithms work based on
4200-425: The online "spider" algorithms, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to
4275-436: The phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engines like ALIWEB . Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using metadata to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because
4350-421: The practitioners who employ them as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. An SEO technique is considered a white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As
4425-414: The primary listings of their search. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate . In November 2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public, which revealed
4500-419: The properties of digits in data structures by using numerical keys. Finally, hashing directly maps keys to records based on a hash function . Algorithms are often evaluated by their computational complexity , or maximum theoretical run time. Binary search functions, for example, have a maximum complexity of O (log n ) , or logarithmic time. In simple terms, the maximum number of operations needed to find
4575-415: The purchase of advertising , including bulk e-mail , pop-up ads , and in-page advertisements. Web traffic can also be purchased through web traffic providers that can deliver targeted traffic. However, buying traffic may negatively affect a site’s search engine rank. Web traffic can be increased not only by attracting more visitors to a site, but also by encouraging individual visitors to "linger" on
SECTION 60
#17327661760084650-427: The same, regardless of language. On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court , Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state
4725-445: The search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to
4800-552: The search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer , extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan ,
4875-519: The search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on 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 and SEO 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. Some search engines have also reached out to
4950-406: The search target is a logarithmic function of the size of the search space. Specific applications of search algorithms include: Algorithms for searching virtual spaces are used in the constraint satisfaction problem , where the goal is to find a set of value assignments to certain variables that will satisfy specific mathematical equations and inequations / equalities. They are also used when
5025-433: The site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of designing, running, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns. Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to
5100-436: The site, viewing many pages in a visit. ( see Outbrain for an example of this practice ) If a web page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly (especially if there is other competition on the first page). Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that go to subsequent pages is substantially lower. Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines,
5175-448: The software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..." Google Instant , real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs,
5250-426: The standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as a hint not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot's meta tag should be included. A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. Page design makes users trust
5325-485: The success and popularity of a search engine are determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms , taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from
5400-433: The web search history of all its users in order to populate search results. On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes,
5475-950: The webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Flawed data in meta tags, such as those that were inaccurate or incomplete, created the potential for pages to be mischaracterized in irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines. By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek , adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings. By heavily relying on factors such as keyword density , which were exclusively within
5550-537: Was blocked to all internet users outside of the U.S. on 25 October 2004 after a reported attack on the site. It is also possible to limit access to a web server both based on the number of connections and the bandwidth expended by each connection. The majority of website traffic is driven by search engines . Millions of people use search engines every day to research various topics, buy products, and go about their daily surfing activities. Search engines use keywords to help users find relevant information, and each of
5625-498: Was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for the use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's search engine results page. SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, depending on
#7992