Ease of Reference
If my site was sold as being focused on search and I wrote an e-book or book
about power searching, it would be far easier for me to get links than running a site
about SEO. For many reasons, the concept of SEO is hated in many circles. The
concept of search is much easier to link at.
Sometimes by broadening, narrowing, or shifting your topic it becomes far easier
for people to reference you.
Primitive Search Technology
As the Web grew, content grew faster than technology did. The primitive nature of
search engines promoted the creation of content, but not the creation of quality
content. Search engines had to rely on the documents themselves to state their
purpose. Most early search engines did not even use the full page content either,
relying instead on page title and document name to match results. Then came
along meta tags.

Meta Tags
Meta tags were used to help search engines organize the Web. Documents listed
keywords and descriptions that were used to match user queries. Initially these tags
were somewhat effective, but over time, marketers exploited them and they lost
their relevancy.
People began to stuff incredibly large amounts of data (which was frequently off
topic) into these tags to achieve high search engine rankings. Porn and other highmargin
websites published meta tags like “free, free, free, free, Disney, free.”
Getting a better ranking simply meant you repeated your keywords a few more
times in the meta tags.
Banners,
It did not help anything that during the first Web bubble stocks were based on
eyeballs, not profits. That meant that people were busy trying to buy any type of
exposure they could, which ended up making it exceptionally profitable to spam
search engines to show off topic random banners on websites.
The Bubble Burst
The Internet bubble burst. What caused such a fast economic recovery was the
shift from selling untargeted ad impressions to selling targeted leads. This meant
that webmasters lost much of their incentive for trying to get any kind of traffic
they could. Suddenly it made far greater sense to try to get niche-targeted traffic.
In 1998, Overture pioneered the pay-per-click business model that most all major
search engines rely on. Google AdWords enhanced the model by adding a few
more variables to the equation—the most important one is factoring ad clickthrough
rate (CTR) into the ad ranking algorithm.
Google extended the targeted advertisement marketing by delivering relevant
contextual advertisements on publisher websites via the Google AdSense program.
More and more ad spending is coming online because it is easy to track the return
on investment. As search algorithms continue to improve, the value of having
well-cited, original, useful content increases daily.
Advancing Search Technology
Instead of relying exclusively on page titles and meta tags, search engine now index
the entire page contents. Since search engines have been able to view entire pages,
the hidden inputs (such as meta tags) have lost much of their importance in
relevancy algorithms.
The best way for search engines to provide relevant results is to emulate a user and
rank the page based on the same things the user see and do (Do users like this
website? Do they quickly hit the back button?), and what other people are saying