mediajunk

Among the services I offer are search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing. The former involves constructing a website in such a way that it gets picked up for searches on relevant queries; the latter involves advising clients on other, paid-for ways to promote a site in search engines (such as Google Adwords, etc.). Both of these services are tolerated by the major search engines -- albeit reluctantly. What search engines can't stand is search engine spam -- pages that deceive either the search engines or web users. Search engine spam is becoming a major problem, even though we don't ever see most of it, as it gets filtered out of the results. However, a significant percentage of the pages on the web are now spam. Just like email spam, many spam web pages are computer-generated, and would be considered a nuisance by the average user. The search engines have been at war with spam for some time, but the research community have lately joined the fight. Check out, for example, this paper from Stanford University, which attempts a taxonomy of spam. I have the feeling, however, that the current relationship between the search engines and spammers is just the beginning of what's going to be a long, ever-complex stretch of evolutionary adaptation and counter-adaptation...