Search engines? mechanisms become more and more perfect. Nevertheless, affordable search engine optimization does not require a thorough understanding of algorithms of their functioning which improve all the time. Detailed techniques producing extraordinary effects today, may stop working tomorrow. Thus, it is more safely to determine a general direction followed by the creators of search engines than concentrate on detailed, often black hat techniques.

Let's try to put ourselves in their shoes. A few years ago, a directory submitting to thousands of other sites required a lot of work and determination. After the software and online scripts, which automatically submit pages to directories, appeared, gaining thousands of links in a short period of time is not a problem any more. At the same time, the number of websites is growing every day and it increases competition for particular keywords. The search engines have to find sites which best suit to the search phrase from millions of sites.

Nowadays, some sites with only a few or more than a dozen links can now have better search ranking than pages connected with hundreds of useless links. This tendency will now certainly grow stronger and stronger.