Have you used a search engine recently and been disappointed with the results it returned?  If so, it is unlikely you are alone.  Here’s why.

In order to survive in the online world, websites need traffic.  Visitors are an essential commodity.  They generate the page impressions and revenues that any website needs to grow and thrive.  Without a constant stream of incoming traffic, even the best websites will curl up and die.

One of the most cost-effective ways of attracting visitors to a site is via search engines.  Every day millions of people query Google, Yahoo and MSN to find websites that match their needs.  Visitors entering a site via a search engine query are highly sought after.  The low cost per visitor helps to improve ROI, and conversion rates can be high as potential customers already have a good idea of the product or service they are looking for.

As a result, competition for places on page one of search results is extremely intense for many keywords and phrases.  It is here where SEO comes in.  Search engine optimisation is the phrase used when a site purposely tries to improve its rankings within search engine results.

Traditionally a site will try to optimise for keywords relevant to its offering by adding keyword rich content, tweaking areas such as URLs, meta data, and section headers, and attracting back links from other sites to establish its authority for a given area or keyword.

However, as the revenue potential of search engine traffic continues to grow sites, sites are going to great lengths to obtain higher rankings.  The majority of search engine traffic is shared amongst sites that rank on the first page, while a top three ranking for a high traffic keyword is the real pot of gold.

With so many sites competing for so few places, the inevitable has happened.  Under pressure to achieve high rankings, many businesses stretch, bend, and even break the guidelines set out by search engines.  This is generally referred to as black hat SEO.

In the UK this problem is becoming more and more of a threat to the quality of both search results and the user experience of those conducting the searches. 

With so much money at stake, some sites will stop at nothing to beat their competition and be the number one ranked site for their desired keywords.  Search engines have always faced a fight to keep spam and poor quality results under control.  But as the rewards become greater, sites are willing to take bigger risks to beat search engine algorithms and obtain money-spinning positions.

The most common method used by UK sites is link spam.  One area of search engine algorithms that can currently be manipulated is back links.  This is especially true of Google.

Search engines use back links (links from other websites) to judge a site's authority in a given niche.  This is used with many other factors to decide where a site will rank for a search query.

This is supposedly based on quality links from trusted sources.  The reality is somewhat different; quantity can still reign supreme.  By generating high numbers of back links, businesses can improve their rankings and attract more visitors.

It is not uncommon for a site to acquire millions of back links from poor quality networks (such as Digital Point) and climb the search results with little resistance from the search engines themselves.

This is brewing into an all-out war where the site with the most links wins.  It is no longer a case of which site offers the most useful content or best user experience.  Beat the search engine algorithms and earn a fortune, it’s as simple as that. 

UK business owners are understandably more interested in the bottom line than adhering to search engine guidelines.  That, of course, is fine; risk versus reward is part and parcel of the business world.  The problems lie with the search engines themselves.

Companies use black hat SEO tactics because, at the moment, they get quick, profitable results.  As long as search engines allow sites such to flout the rules without consequence, we will continue to see link buying on a massive scale.  Poor quality sites will continue to pollute the results, which will eventually be filled with garbage sites.

Search traffic in the UK is big bucks, and until Google, Yahoo and their ilk make an effort to really punish those who use black hat techniques such as the Digital Point network, the problems will only get worse.