As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I have frequently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to try their hand at competing with Google) that
stress level of many webmasters has gone way up. This condition applies not only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to webmasters in general.Additionally, it seems that many people that are in business of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going completely bonkers. As Google came on scene in 1998 and quickly dominated search business, website optimization became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely, pleasing Google...for all intents and purposes, Google became "800 pound gorilla" of search engine business.
Since advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that search engine industry can once again turn SEO business on its ear, and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop) relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.
Not only are there now several viable players (most notably Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in search engine business, but they are all adopting different and frequently changing algorithms for determining ranking positions for websites.
The current game is that webmasters are trying to figure out how various search engines perform their rankings and, on flip side, search engines are striving to be quite unpredictable to those webmasters and SEO firms.
