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Search Engine Optimization History

March 5, 2008

History Of Search Engine Optimization / Marketing

Where did it all start?

For many people it was back in 1995 / 1996 during the early days of Yahoo! where people would stuff keywords all over the place then check back later to see where they ranked. It was pretty easy back then to get indexed, submit your site and within 72 hours there you were.

Shortly after that, 1996 / 1997 Alta Vista was the main search engine and Google was just in the concept stages at Standford University dorm room under the name of Backrub, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The Backrub search technology was mainly focused on the counting of back links.

At that time Alta Vista was way ahead of the rest of the field even though the number of users of search engines like MSN, Yahoo, Netscape, Lycos, Info Seek, and Excite all were pretty much even.

During 1997 the first Search Engine algorithms crackers came to surface, studying the make up of the pages in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) as this at the time were where the major workings of how the search engines algorithms became understood.

Quite a few search engines began to use Yahoo! as a quick Quality Assessment check, so getting into Yahoo! became top of the list.

During the end of 1997 Infoseeks daily refresh, submit a site by 7am-8am and you were in their database and cleaning up in referral income shortly after than afternoon. It was everyones favorite SE (Search Engine), no brain storming necessary to figure out how to rank for pages.

Spam became a very serious problem during this time of the year as sites began to understand the search engine algorithms and how to manipulate them. Altavista and Hotbot were shattered and became useless

In 1998 search engines were going to move away from onpage factors and move to the offpage criteria as the papers were delivered to the WWW conferences. Decoding the search engines algorithms started to become very sophisticated during 1998 - 1999. Optimization firms started to dig deep into their pockets and hire highly skilled programmers to write efficient search engine algorithm crackers to figure out how and why pages were given their particular ranking position.

Search Engines began to modernize with multi-languages, a series of word lists (term vectors) and several their language expertise, the world of the word guru is given birth.

Google, otherwise known as “googol” that refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zero’s, hits the scene, their first build of 25 million URL’s indexed made it quite clear they have a future. Google really started to hit home with their advertising campaign to launch Adwords with AOL, over 10,000 sign ups in one day, which lead to hundreds of thousands of people using the Adwords system and Google’s search engine in less than a month, the fastest growth on record put them in contention to compete with existing and up and coming Search Engines.

ODP, the very first open source, independent, free directory is born.

1999 Altavista makes a comeback with too many URL’s and bans a huge amount of web domains page’s and sites with auto doorway page generators (spam generators). Then other search engines started some sort of war on SEO. If the search engines found any pages that you made with any kind of words stating that you had optimized your site, BOOM, you’d be in for it and banned.

Quite a few Search Engine Optimization Firms started falling out (de-listed) of the search engines in a unsightly fashion.

At this time the search engine algorithm crackers were on their toes as usual, producing some of their best work yet on sections towards the offpage factor such as link popularity. But decoding what decides a page to get in the top ten results proved to be difficult. Those that knew spent literally 10 times more effort to get half the rankings they did in 1998. Algorithm crackers sort of admitted defeat and became statistic generators.

Google’s PageRank takes hold while other search engines self destruct due to the management chaos.

Google clearly wins over the other SE’s as the main Hub / Authorities Model. It globally wipes clean of all the junk from the over bloated databases and recognizes the mega sites in each keyword sector.

As we leap frog into our current time, search engines take into consideration a wide range of factors undisclosed to anyone about their ranking algorithms. It’s been stated that there could be as many as 200 different signals that ranks a page. However some well known SEO practitioners may also study patents that are held by various search engines to gain a further insight how search engines rank pages with their complex algorithms.

Search engines today recognize that some web site owners are making efforts to rank well in their search engines and manipulating the page rankings. Infoseek were one of many that noticed this back in the early days and tried to prevent webmasters manipulating website rankings by placing keywords in a excessive manner on their pages as well as keywords completely irrelevant.

It’s also important to note that search engines are targeting a lot of SEO firms. Most SEO firms practice aggressive SEO Techniques which can lead to their clients websites banned from the search engine results. A similar case was noted in the Wall Street Journal stating that Traffic Power used high-risked techniques and didn’t disclose those techniques to its customers.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO are the main techniques of course as well as Gray Hat, the techniques been good and the bad. White Hat SEO is considered to be one that conforms with the guidelines that are laid out by the search engines in which the techniques used doesn’t involved deception.

A Black Hat technique can be described as one being where you use hidden text on a web page being the same color as the background, or an div tag positioned way off the page and out of the site of most people’s monitors and cloaking which gives a different page depending who’s actually requesting to have a page loaded, ie, if the search engine tries to load the page, it loads the site in question, but if a human loads it, it goes else where. Sites that are ranked highly for competitive terms seem to fall victim to such unethical practices as other people steal their traffic.

It’s fairly easy to rank for pages in the search engines, no matter what search engine it is, Google, Yahoo, MSN, how? conform to their guidelines, and your rankings will be long lived.

Over the course of the months ahead, there will be many articles on how to rank for your keywords using ONLY White Hat techniques.

So stay tuned. :)

I hope you enjoyed this article.


Written by Loz · Filed Under Search Engine Optimization 

Comments

One Response to “Search Engine Optimization History”

  1. Blu Thunder on April 1st, 2008 9:47 pm

    Good basic information on SEO will be referring to this again. Thanks Loz

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