Search engine Google has long since entered the colloquial vocabulary, thanks to its control of nearly two thirds of the search engine market.  At the heart of this wildly successful service is the engine's driving algorithm, PageRank (originally known as BackRub).  This algorithm operates to rank search results.  With keywords like "online dating" yielding millions of pages, the algorithm sorts them based on links.  The basic logic -- the more reputable sites linked to the site, the higher the result (reputation of linking sites is in turn judged by their number of links).

However, all is not well in the world of Google as it is struggling to deal with the massive industry that has emerged in both legitimately and illegitimately raise pages' ranks through various tricks.  This industry is known as search engine optimization (SEO).  The practice is divided into so called "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. 

White hat techniques include making pages friendlier for Google's web indexing robots and providing accurate descriptions of user content.  Black hat techniques include putting fake text in pages that is not visible.  It also can include pointing search engines to a different page than the one users see.  Also, the process of buying and selling links is considered black hat by Google. 

Such techniques got BMW and Ricoh Germany's sites booted from search results in 2006, until the companies issued formal apologies and revised their sites.  More recently, FindLaw, a property of Thomson Reuters, was exposed by a leaked email that offered to sell "up to three hard-coded links will be placed on editorially relevant pages of content" along with other services for $1,000 dollars.  FindLaw panicked and quickly shut down the service and issued an apology for fear of being delisted by Google.

Matt Stoddart, executive vice president of sales at search marketing company LinkWorth cautions, "According to Google, unless a Webmaster links to you on their own, for whatever reason, you shouldn't be buying or selling inbound links. That makes you black hat to them. We work with some of the biggest advertisers in the world. Their feeling is they're being negligent if they don't buy links...we are right smack dab in the middle."

Some like Mr. Stoddart question whether the practice of buying, selling, or trading links is such a bad thing.  They say that while Google considers these techniques black hat, they're really gray hat as there is widespread disagreement on whether the practice is negative.  Many large sites use such techniques to gain traffic, as Mr. Stoddart's comments reflect, and they compose a significant portion of the SEO business.

Some decidedly gray techniques don't rely on money, but are still frowned upon by Google, though not disallowed.  Among these are widget baiting, making components that users add to their websites, which include a link back to your site.  Another common practice is link baiting -- creating a colorful post and relying on word of mouth in the blogging community to grow a number of links rapidly.

Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the Search Engine Land site is among those that believes attempts to control such processes are futile.  He states, "I think buying links tends to be more evil the more it is being done to propel bad quality or irrelevant sites into the top listings. Personally, it's not something I like.  But then when you see the ways people may get links through bartering or because they know someone--say a top blogger links to a friend with some nice anchor text--is that really a 'deserved' link either? Rather than wage what might be a losing war on paid links, I'd rather see Google take Microsoft's attitude that they'll try to judge the value of a link regardless whether it is bought or sold."

Matt Cutts, who as head of Google's Webspam polices abuse of Google's search engine disagrees, but insists Google is merely trying to develop more accurate search algorithms, not trying to police the web.  He states, "We see the majority of the trend is people trying to find legitimate ways.  The hope is you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Our approach is to try not to do hand-to-hand combat. We try to find algorithms that will shut down a whole technique.  Google does reserve the right to take manual action on spam.  Google is good at detecting machine-generated spam, so we don't see much of that these days."

Gaming the user searches is no new trick.  As far back as the 50s and 60s many businesses deliberately inserted "AAA" in their names to get listed first in the phone book.  However, with Google thus far not defining precise standards on many of the diverse SEO techniques, search engine gaming falls largely under the gray area.  The result is uncertainty, with no clear end in sight, say analysts.  Says Sage Lewis, president of online marketing company SageRock, "Eighty percent (of SEO business) is in the middle.  Some people consider SEOs to be spammers. If there were standards, that could make us more reputable."