Today we would say that the first implementation of PageRank was a form of crowdsourcing. The crowd was early webmasters, and they helped determine the relevancy of Web pages by linking to them. It didn’t take long for “search engine specialists” to figure out how to game the system for fun and profit. For more than a decade, these self-styled SEO specialists have been manipulating search engine results with all sorts of tactics, ranging from link farms and blog spam to metatag keyword stuffing, going so far as to substitute fake non-spammy link-bait content when they detect a Googlebot crawling their sites.
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Google's Great New Adventure
Posted by: Barbara Hudson March 20, 2012 05:00 AMToday we would say that the first implementation of PageRank was a form of crowdsourcing. The crowd was early webmasters, and they helped determine the relevancy of Web pages by linking to them. It didn’t take long for “search engine specialists” to figure out how to game the system for fun and profit. For more than a decade, these self-styled SEO specialists have been manipulating search engine results with all sorts of tactics, ranging from link farms and blog spam to metatag keyword stuffing, going so far as to substitute fake non-spammy link-bait content when they detect a Googlebot crawling their sites.