When the Internet started out in 1997, it was naturally vulnerable to abuse. Those who created it had yet to perfect it while dealing with the unknown. Nobody exactly knew how such technology would make it outside where people would be using it. When search engine optimization and its benefits first came to public knowledge, it was automatically explored and practiced by businessmen who believed it was the solution to their classic problem of poor Internet visibility which automatically translated to poor sales.

Of course, the Internet itself was technology and its advantages had to exhausted if it were to serve man significantly. Since the only way to improve site performance was to make it turn up on results pages, seo experts toyed with all sorts of ideas on how to beat these engines' algorithms and actually have their sites landing where they wanted them - at the top of a search engine ranking page or SERP. This became a battle among programmers who were commissioned by site owners to crack the formulas that the engines used in indexing pages. By this time, spammers were born.

Search engines used so called "spiders" to pick up information for each web page on the Internet so it would know which sites to display on its search results. When an search engine optimization submission expert knew exactly what keywords to use in his meta tags, he site had a great chance of getting a good ranking. However, as the Internet had yet to be perfected back then, spammers bombarded their content with all of these keywords even if they started to diminish the quality of their sites. In other words, search engine optimization then was simply about overstuffing your information with search spider-friendly words and working HTML magic to be able to beat the engines and competing sites.

Today, old-school seo just wouldn't work because search engines have become smarter and better at spotting black hats. In fact, when content is detected to have a higher keyword density than allowed, the site is simply skipped by the spiders, hence, burying the site down into the deepest pits of search engine results. In worst cases, the it is simply banned. Today, some web programmers still attempt to crack the search engines' algorithms in indexing pages but none has, so far, succeeded. In fact, a more holistic approach is now being used for evaluating sites with deeper aspects of seo marketing such as competitive analysis, copywritng and copyediting being factors in a site's chance of getting good Internet visibility.