By 1997, search engine
designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in
their search engines, 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 in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating
rankings.[26]
In
2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the
Web was created to bring together practitioners and researchers concerned with
search engine optimisation and related topics.[27]
Companies
that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned
from 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.[28] Wired magazine reported that the same
company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.[29] Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in
fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.[30]
Some
search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent
sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. Major search
engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.[31][32] 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.[33] Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to
submit a sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the crawl rate, and
track the web pages index status.
.
