Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a catch-all term for the various tactics and strategies for improving a page's rank within search engines, is the sort of thing not discussed in polite company. While there are legitimate techniques for this, and legitimate sellers of SEO strategies, it is one of the internet's many dark underbellies. Spam blogs, blogs generated by a computer, designed to create the appearance of linkage to a particular site are but one black-hat technique. Here's a discussion of it on Wikipedia, if you'd like more info.
It's a big industry, and, if you'd been reading our linkroll, you'd know that a recent study found that SEO produces a greater ROI than actual paid advertisements alongside search.
The extent to which big companies engage in extensive SEO is not well known, and for the major search engines, the hope is that they pay up for advertising instead of trying to game their rankings. Still, given the compelling economics, it's no surprise that Forbes.com has hired a company help them list better in search engine rankings:
Forbes.com said it has hired a specialist to help it appear higher in search results, a sign of the growing importance of search engines to news publishers.
360i, a search engine optimization firm based in New York, will adjust the code and makeup of the Forbes.com site to make sure search engine spiders catch the pages.
Now this is pretty vague, but I doubt that the search engines were somehow missing some of Forbes.com pages, though that could be wrong. What's significant is that the money they're paying to 360i is money not being handed to Google or Yahoo. It's too early to say how much of a problem this will be, and by some accounts the worst is already behind us...but as we know, it's really hard for a company to stay ahead of hackers, and Google is gonna face this problem just as much as Microsoft.
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