Manual manipulation of the search engine results was first publicized by Yahoo!'s use of the H=0/1/2/3 phenomenon. This surprising discovery alerted SEOs to the fact that for very popular keyword phrases, the top results could not be manipulated with any algorithmic targeting. Nevertheless, the issue has, relatively speaking, died on the vine.

Over the past 6 months, however, more and more news and whisperings have leaned towards the idea of manual review and inclusion for popular searches. Yahoo! has mentioned multiple times that their search results for a certain percentage of the searches performed online have been manually reviewed to keep out spam and poor quality results. Google began hiring experts in specific fields to review search results from home and report on their quality. AskJeeves, Google, Yahoo! & MSN have all reported on partnerships that re-direct specific queries to partnered results.

Given the rise in manual re-direction by the search engines, will there come a time when the 'organic' search results as we know them no longer exist?

If so, how should the SEO & webmaster community respond? The answer is content and growth. If the future is bringing a massive reduction in organically generated search result positions determined by algorithms and switching to a more human-edited version of results, the answer is to be included by those human editors. The higher the quality of the results sites offer, the more likely it is that those sites will not be weeded from the search index or tagged by industry experts as 'poor-quality' results. Focus on content, and one day, your site may be the partnership site for the search engines, rather than the site that's number 1 in the algorithm, yet sits on search results page #3.