Search Engine Optimisation

The search engines caught up with the tricks these webmasters were using and introduced another factor which would influence a site’s position on the results pages. This was the number of incoming links to the site. This was around the same time that Google’s Page Rank Algorithm came about. Google’s page rank essentially states that each link to a page represents a ‘vote’ for that page, so the more links a page has the more authority that page has.

The focus on the number of inbound links led to another form of spamming. People started buying links or swapping links just to increase the number of links they had. It is evident that just because a web page has 1000 links doesn’t make it more of an authoritative page than one with 100 links, when considering that links can simply be bought.

So once again the search engines had to re-evaluate their criteria for gauging the importance of a Web site. This time they focussed attention on the relevancy of the Web site the link was on to the Web site at the other end of the link. If the subjects were related, this was deemed good by the search engines. If not, this wasn’t so good and even potentially harmful.