In India also Consultant firms arose to serve the needs of these site owners, and attempted to develop an understanding of the search engines' internal logic or algorithms. The goal was to develop a set of practices for search engine friendly copywriting, site coding and search engine submission that would ensure maximum exposure for a website.

Controversies of SEO

As the industry developed, search engines quickly became wary of unscrupulous SEO firms that attempted to generate traffic for their customers at any cost (the most common problem being search results' decreasing relevance). One frequent practice, called keyword spamming, involved the insertion of random text at the bottom of a webpage, colored to match the background of the page. The inserted text usually included words that were frequently searched (such as sex), with the goal of getting rankings, and thus access to large streams of traffic. The search engines responded with a continuous series of countermeasures, designed to filter out the "noise" generated by these artificial techniques. In turn, several SEO firms developed ever-more-subtle techniques to influence rankings.