There is war going on and it has been raging ever since the first search engine appeared online. The general public doesn't even realize this war exsists. The typical person goes about his life oblivious to the carnage that is occurring even though they are probably part of the cause. They are part of the cause because they have a credit card in their pocket and they search for what they need on Google. Although this war does not actually shed any blood, there have been casualties. Casualties in the way of websites that have fallen by the wayside. Websites that have been shot down by the search engines and are now lying dormant, forgotten and buried.
This war is between the search engines and the SEO - the Search Engine Optimizer.
Even if you don't have the title SEO, if you own a website and you make modifications to it for the sole purpose of moving up the ranks on the search engines, you are in the war.
The war started when the site owners realized that if they stuffed a huge amount of keywords in the keyword meta tage, their site would should up at the top of the search engines. I still remember clearly how the first few pages of search results were rarely what I was looking for. So the search engines battled back and came up with different algorithms for rankings.
So the SEO changed and came up with different ways of getting found higher in the search results. The engines battled back and changed their algorithms. So the SEO adapt and came up with different ways to rank higher. And the battles raged on.
I think this has been a good war.
I still remember the day that I would go to a search engine, type in a phrase such as 'red car' and the first few pages of results would be porn, the worst spammers. It was often very difficult to find what you were looking for.
Due to the war, however, things have changed. I find that results are now quite accurate. The search engines tend to post relevant results and the better sites tend to find their way to the top. Both the user, the web surfer and the quality site owners all benefit. By working against each other, the SEO and the search engines have made a better Internet.
