Evolution and SEO

Darwin went on Galapagos tours to see the effects of evolution on finches on its many islands. SEO is a battle for survival. Search engines are the environment for the results and search engine optimisation specialists create websites that adapt to the search environment exploiting every niche. If your website appears in a good position there is a good chance that your company can generate enough revenue to keep on in business. Websites that don’t have to find other ways to compete.
If the environment changes then your website must adapt to survive. We are seeing the demise of black-hat SEO because the search environment has changed. Search engine are getting better at finding sites that use inappropriate optimisation techniques such as link-farms, content theft. Black-hat SEO has to find more extreme techniques to work making it something that many sites would not find acceptable.

Such techniques are also more vulnerable to collapsing due to changes in the search engine’s algorithms. If you are interested in long-term survival then it is  better to look at ethical SEO and grow your site into maturity. Trust factors are more important in the overall strategy and these can be built only over time.