Google became the best search engine not because of their simple clean homepage, but because of the quality of their results through link popularity. Non-validated linking however, was slowly eroding away this advantage. The Google engine was getting saturated with link builders also called spammers. They would go out and build as many links as possible just to trick the Google spiders into a false sense of popularity. Google engineers had to come up with a solution for this fraudulent linking so they began validating only industry related reciprocal links. Google didn’t stop there, they took it a step further, and they put a higher value on one-way inbound links. This is when someone links to a website because they truly think its popular not because they are getting a link back. So the adjustment in the algorithm was made and spammers were hit hard, websites fell hundreds of pages from the results. But the spammers weren’t down for good. They needed to adapt to this algorithm change. The next thing they would do is to find a way to get the one-way links and have control. The methods used were directories and link farms , considered by many to be a form of unethical linking.