Search engine indexing by Google, Yahoo, Bing and others has improved dramatically during the past decade. It needed to. To keep up with the pace of online information added as well as stay ahead of the countless purveyors of junk who exploit the information indexes, the search engines have continued to invest heavily in highly secretive algorithms to parse, evaluate, categorize and rank the billions of web pages strewn throughout the Internet.

Some of the biggest improvements in online indexing have been realized from efforts at weeding out the junk. "Online Junk" primarly includes SEO (search engine optimization) exploiters trying to drive traffic to sometimes useless information on often dubious products. The practice of SEO optimization has become a feeding frenzy as businesses now realize the market potential for higher ranking keyword searches.

Unfortunately, practices often employed by business sites seeking to improve the bottom line often are in direct conflict with the goal of search engines, namely - provide the most accurate, relevant and useful information in ranked order of perceived benefit or revelance to the searcher.

Although no specifics have been provided by Google and other search engine creators, it is now generally understood most modern engines now penalize SEO expoitations schemes. The most common of these schemes being keyword stuffing and link exchanges.