Everyone and anyone who has ever used an internet search engine knows the value and frustration of the searches and search engine optimization, it doesn’t matter if you are someone trying to use a search engine to identify a specific piece of information or if you are a business person trying to break into the global ecommerce market, we all have some sort of complaint about internet searches.

These days when we need information we no longer go to the local library and throw ourselves at the reference librarian. Now when we need information we boot up our personal computers, connect to the internet, and access our favorite search engine and type in the keywords that should access the necessary information. Thrilled, we scan the long list of potential hits, it looks like its going to be an easy research project. Cheerfully, you click on the link for the first website, and then the second, and then the third. Each website is filled with gobbely gook that bears little resemblance to the information you are looking for. Taking a deep breath you return to the search engine’s homepage and reenter your keywords, jumbling the order of the words, thinking that maybe this time you’ll get a hit. Once again you get nothing but a bunch of gobbely gook. You run search after search after search. You try a variety of search engines, other then a few advertisements you get very little information about what you’re looking for.

Resisting the urge to throw your computer out the window, you grab your car keys and wallet and head to the local library.

You have just been a victim of spamdexing.

Spamdexing is a problem that drives everyone from the college student trying to write a research paper, to the businessperson trying to make a go of their business related website, to the powers that be at the search engines insane.

Spamdexing is the use of various methods that manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner that is inconsistent with the indexing systems guidelines. The word spamdexing was first coined by Eric Convey in an article he wrote for The Boston Herald in 1996. The article was called “Porn sneaks way back on Web.”

Spamdexers are webmasters that take complete advantage of search engines, completely ignoring respected forms of search engine optimization. Spamdexers use a variety of techniques to make sure their websites are in the listed in the fertile first two pages of search results, many times the pages bear little if any resemblance to the original search.

Search engines powers that be understand the frustration spamdexers bring out in people struggling to run legitimate internet searchers. They know that spamdexing can add hours of time and mind-numbing frustration to what should be a simple internet search. Its cliché but they really do feel your pain and are trying to eliminate the problem. On January 25, 2007 Google took an active role in trying to stop the spamdexers on its search engine by going after websites that specialized in Google bombing. Several of the major search engines have rewritten their web crawler’s algorithms to make keyword stuffing difficult, rejecting any websites that simply made lists of keywords.

Most search engines would like internet users to report websites that they suspect of spamdexing.