Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a decade old phenomenon. The term search engine optimization has not appeared in any text before 1996. It came into the lingo in 1997, i.e., a few years after the search engines came in. Since that time, they are having a love-hate relationship, triggered by black-hat web masters and the more intelligent search engines.

Those who operate search engines recognize quickly that some web masters (specifically search engine optimizers) are making bold efforts to rank well in their search engines, even by manipulating the page rankings in search results. For Infoseek and some other search engines, optimizers were grabbing the source code of the top-ranking pages and placing it in their pages. They were successful in this way to top the search engine rankings. But, that's the old story.

Then web optimization companies were exploiting open source resources for their own financial gains. Search engines have always frowned upon those aggressive SEO practices; going to the extent of banning the pages in their search listings. The more aggressive site owners' who generate automated sites for better ranking, suffered much search engine wrath; their domains were banned from the search engines.

An annual conference named Air Web was held 1997 to eaze the tension between SEO and search engines companies to minimize the sometimes-damaging effects of aggressive web content providers. Though, due to the high value of search results, there will always be an adversary relationship between search engines and SEOs.

The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google later confirmed that it in fact banned Traffic Power and some of its clients for black-hat techniques.

Today, many search engine optimization companies employ long-term, low-risk strategies; some SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies for their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of taking the risk on client's web sites. Read more on love hate relationship

Google, since its early days has been gaining intelligence, it has enforced web page restrictions for years, such as for hidden-text in 2006. It punishes non-standard web sites by automatically blocking the search-results for 30-35 days or longer. It does allow for a reinclusion request, and the re-indexing of that web site might take a total of 2-4 months.

MSN Search and Yahoo! do not automatically punish the web sites for small amounts of hidden text. In early 2006, MSN Search typically re-indexed small web sites every 14 days, and Yahoo! also re-indexed quickly, much faster than Google, but all three MSN/Yahoo!/Google could require more than a month to index a new page on an old web site.

However, the condition is improving. Today search engines are competing and some have reached out to SEO industry. They organize sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. With the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community.