History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization

HISTORY OF SEO

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the process of ranking websites on the basis of given keywords. Google is the most widely used search engines among others like Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc...

Google was basically a project of two college students in 1998. First, they uploaded google as a subdomain under their university in which the search results will be sent to the given email id within 24 hours. After the students graduated, they formed Google as a company, but it did not attain much attention. Those days, websites like Yahoo was broadly used by people compared to google. On 11 September 2001, the terrorist group under Al-Qaida made an attack on World Trade Centre in US. Since it became a breaking news, some of the people using google searched about the World Trade Center but unfortunately the results did not provide much information. Since the World Trade Centre was also the tallest building in the world at that time, google not providing the necessary information turned into a major discussion topic. When the google officials called on a meeting regarding the issue, the search engineers pointed out that websites were not crawlable in google.

Search engines like Google works mainly on 3 process- Crawling, Caching and Indexing. Crawling is the process in which a program called WebCrawler scans the website to know what the page is exactly about. A Snapshot of the page is taken and is saved into the databases belonging to their categories called Caching. Google indexes these saved data for  search results and hence it is called Indexing.

 

Since those days, as most websites were not crawlable , the next question question the search engineers raise was how to make a webpage crawlable? So, in order to make the webpages crawlable, the google officials decided to publish optimization practices among the webmasters. Google search engineers opposed this decision by pointing out that the optimization practices are secret files and thus it will affect the existence of the company. At last they decided to publish the document called "SEO Starter Guide" among the webmasters. And thus the optimization practice started and google was able to crawl many webpages.

 

EVOLUTION  OF SEO

At first google was niche or content specific. So Google ranked the websites on the basis of number of occurrences of the keywords used which prompted the webmasters to overuse their focusing keywords called Keyword Stuffing. This was a Black Hat SEO Technique(unethical practice) where the webmasters stuff more keywords to rank in google.  Then google changed its algorithms to Link Specific where the websites will rank based on the number of  recommendation links(hyper links) received from other websites. This made the website owners starting to sell links to the webmasters attempting to get links from websites. The drawback is that the webmasters failed to maintain the quality of the website nor improve the quality of the content. Knowing this, Google made another strategy where they rank the websites based on a  page rank  out of 10 called Quality Link Specific. Then website owners with high page rank started selling links to the webmasters.

Therefore, Google again introduced a new strategy called Passing The Juice (or link juice). It performs in such a way that when a high page rank website offers links to other websites, the page rank(equity) of the offering website decreases. At the same time they also added a 'no follow' attribution where websites can offer links to other websites by not passing their equity.

 

In the course of 2003 to 2008, google failed to bring any noticeable changes in their algorithms or updations. When google was established as a search engine, it introduced two advertising programmes - Google AdWords(now known as Google Ads) & Google AdSense. Google AdWords is an advertising program to advertise a product or a service of a website in the form of an advertisement to the public . Google AdSense is a revenue generating program where people can generate earnings by displaying the advertisement in their website. The amount spent in AdWords is used to give commission to the people advertising or website publishers in AdSense. So the publishers, in order to generate more revenue practice SEO for improving their ranking. Hence updation of google will affect these ranking and decrease the number of clicks to generate revenue which will lead to the reduction of revenue of google too. So google was unable to complete its updation or change its algorithm.

 

By 2009,  they made Google more interactive like a personal assistant by introducing google search, personalized search results and many more. One important updation was that the website ranking was made on the basis of the user interaction.

By 2010, the ranking was also based on the counted interaction of influential people liking the posts .