Why do companies pay people to please a search engine?

Companies pay for search engine optimization, or SEO, because being on the first page of results is worth a lot, and ranking there without paying for ads takes work. SEO is the practice of improving the visibility of web pages in unpaid, organic search results rather than paid advertising. Some of that work is honest, like writing clear, useful pages. Some of it is a game of tricks, and the engines play against it.

The game started in the mid-1990s, when the first search engines were cataloguing the early web. Early ranking formulas weighted certain parts of a page, and web authors learned to exploit that. One 1996 newspaper article described site operators loading their pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines would list them among legitimate addresses. The article called it spamdexing, a mix of spamming and indexing. By then the tricks were making the leading engines of the time less useful.

Engines fought back with new rules, and people who write about the trade sorted the methods into two camps. White hat techniques follow the engines' recommendations. Black hat techniques are ones the engines do not approve. White hat tactics tend to give long-lasting results, while black hat tactics risk penalties. Even big brands get caught: in February 2006 Google removed the German websites of BMW and Ricoh for deceptive practices, and restored them after both apologized and fixed their pages.

Ranking by links was harder to fool than ranking by words, but not impossible. Sellers of links appeared, and some schemes built thousands of sites purely for link spamming. So search engines keep their ranking formulas secret and keep changing them. Every ranking rule creates an incentive to game it.