Way back in the late 1990’s, search engines used to rank websites (more specifically individual pages) based largely on keyword density. The closer you managed to get your web page to the ideal keyword density at the time, the better your rankings became.
If, for arguments sake, Google was looking for an average keyword density of 5%, then you simply needed to get your page as close to that density as possible for the keyword term you were trying to target. So if your page contained 100 words, 5 of those words should’ve been the keyword term you wished to rank for. Webmasters quickly learned that all they needed to do to manipulate their rankings was to change the keyword density of their pages. As an example, they could simply increase (or decrease) the amount of times the term “dog training advice” appeared in their pages to improve it’s relative importance, and therefore ranking in Google.
Those sure were the days. It was easy.
However this presented a major problem.
It put the control and influence of search engine results in the hands of webmasters.
The more webmasters that realized and took advantage of this, the more the search engines became filled with poor quality and “less relevant” search results.
As the knowledge spread it also saw the emergence of the highly aggressive “blackhat” search engine tricks and large (almost industrial) scale search engine spamming and manipulation.
In its very earliest and simplest form it included “keyword stuffing”.
That was the practice of making the target keyword terms the same color as the background of a webpage. The search engines could see the terms (and record the keyword density), but regular visitors couldn’t. In effect you were presenting one thing to the search engines and another to your visitors.
Many people also used automated software programs to create thousands upon thousands of