There have been some major changes at the famous California Googleplex of late – and it’s had some people wondering if search engine optimization is still a viable marketing approach. It most definitely is!

Here’s why.

Google, the search engine giant, has been applying its algorithms to ranking websites since the company’s inception, way back in 1997. The reason it has a dominant market share (70 percent in the United States) is that its search engine answers questions correctly.

It just plain works.

But once the company’s name became a verb (“Google it”), finding ways of gaming the system was inevitable. Spammers by the score would try to best the engine and get their websites to come up first in results. They did this by any number of nefarious means, including putting white words on a white background, so people wouldn’t see the keywords they were stuffing their sites with, but Google would.

It didn’t take long for Google to uncover those lame attempts at ranking illegitimately. They then tweaked their algorithms (the computer programs that find the appropriate ranking clues on a site) to punish the offenders.