History and Evolution of SEO

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SEO!

History of SEO 

We might ask ourselves, "How did google come into existence?” or “Where did google come from?”.

To answer this question we need to go way back to the life of two college students (namely Larry Page and Sergey Brin) in 1998 from  Stanford University in California who created google as a part of their project. It was released as a sub domain in their college and the result for our searches would  be sent to our mail address( within 24 hours) that was to be provided along with our search query in the google search engine.

However Google gained its recognition as a reputed company only around 2001 before which Yahoo stood as the frontrunner.

The way in which it gained its popularity is quite an interesting story!

On account of the 9/11 attack on World Trade Center, USA by the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, most people were curious to know more about WTC as the news spread worldwide. But the few people who did use Google at that time could not find any information in regards to the world known WTC,USA.

This made Google’s already low reputation even lower.

To resolve this situation ,Google conducted an official meeting with the agenda being, 'Why when searched about World Trade Center in Google, no information was available?’. The then employed search engineers explained that most of the web pages were not crawlable by Google or the sites that were crawled through were assorted into wrong databases as all these sites aimed at looks over quality improvement.

The  next question that arose from the officials is how could they make the websites crawlable to which  the only solution was in the hands of web masters. Though at the cost of its security and secret files, google released a SEO starter guide( of 32 pages ) which consisted of certain optimization guidelines that had to be applied by the webmasters onto their sites. The modified sites became easily crawlable and could be easily cached and indexed and thus the information in databases became filled with accurate information. This marked the beginning of SEO and its importance.

Thus when the users got the right results for their searches ,more and more users started relying on google for its dependability and accuracy.

Evolution of SEO 

Niche based search engine :At the beginning google was content specific /niche specific ,ie , google search engine gave results or ranked websites on the number of times a particular keyword is repeated .The website that had more number of desirable keyword ranked higher .

However this led to increasing competition among web masters to rank higher leading them to use black hat SEO techniques to increase their rank.

One such technique was keyword stuffing : in a niche specific search engine, repeatedly using a keyword in various places would favour your ranking among other sites.

Google soon realised the spam taking place and created ways to understand the spam/fake websites. So a webmaster using keyword stuffing in their sites would rank high until google recognized the site and removes their site as a form of punishment.

Google then released an official statement in their blog stating that ranking would no longer be based on keyword meta tagging. Instead they were now link specific ,ie, they changed their working principle by making changes in their algorithm.

Niche specific ----->  Link specific

Link specific based search engine : its the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. Building links is beneficial in SEO optimization as it is a signal to google that your site is a quality source worth of mention ,ie, you would get a higher rank.

Quite expectedly, people started creating websites solely for selling links to earn money. The quality optimization for webmasters became less of a priority for them. This in turn decreased google search engine quality. Hence google once again changed its algorithm  form link specific to quality link specific

                                                   Link specific -----> Quality link specific

Quality link specific based search engine: search engines only allowed links from high quality trusted websites( with high page rank)  ,to boost the rank of the linked website.

To measure the quality of a site, google brought forth  page rank or trust value( a  scale form 0 to 10;10 having the highest quality).The factors on which google decided the page rank of a site were quite confidential but it was known that they took into consideration more than 200 signals to determine it.

Yet again websites with high page ranks started selling links even to websites with questionable quality. Google couldn’t control untrustworthy websites from ranking high.

To counteract this google introduced the concept of link juice.

It simply refers to the value or equity passed from site to another. This value is passed through the form of hyperlinks. Google sees these links as votes ,ie, the websites linked were valuable and genuine. However once you link websites, your equity passes or your page rank decreases. To avoid this one can use the attribute rel=”nofollow” along with the links. It now becomes a no follow link ,ie , there is no equity loss.

Through 2003 to 2008 google gained more recognition. They stated thinking of ways they can benefit through this popularity. This let to the introduction of an online advertising program in google with customizable options called Google Adwords (earlier called Google Ads). By paying money, you could promote your site through ads displayed by google. In this way google started receiving revenue. 

Another concept introduced was Google AdSense wherein google ads could be promoted in your high ranked sites and you could earn a small amount of money through this. The trick though was that it was a pay per click program where only if users clicked on the ad ,one would earn a small part of the revenue received by google.

By 2008, google tried to improve the quality besides that of the search engine. They wanted to help people by creating a personal assistant ,ie ,to more of an interactive form  (ex:google maps,google news,weather etc).Thus people became more dependant on google.

Personalized search result: google tracks the keywords you search and the sites you open based on it. If you were to use the same keyword again, google opens the same site you used.

Google suggest: By 2009 google suggest came into play. It was feature of the  google search engine wherein it shows the most used searches by users which is always being updated.

Social media signals: By 2010, social media signals was taken by google for ranking.

 

Glossary

1. Keyword meta tagging - snippets of text in the source code which helps search engines to recognize your page.
2. Crawling - a program in google called web crawler/spider which scans through new web pages.
3. Caching -  after crawling , web crawlers takes a copy and saves it in assorted databases.
4. Indexing - information is indexed to the users from the stored information in the databases.
5. Black hat SEO technique - the use of unethical strategies to promote websites.
6. Webmaster - person responsible for creation/maintenance/modification of a website generally for a company or business.