History and Evolution of SEO

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

How it all started;

Before we dive into SEO's , let's take a step back and get to know how everything came along. Starting off with Google- a multinational technology company which is most notable for it's highly renowned search engine. The search engine was at first a  research project started by two college students. What was once set up under the college domain got registered as an independent domain in '97 and the company was set up soon after in '98.

A rookie company still at it's base, faced many problems -the biggest of them being in 2001, when the World Trade Centre Attack occurred. Daily users were quick to point out how the search engine did not hold any information regarding the tragic incident which was recognised all over the globe. A conference was set up soon after by the officials with the meeting revolving around the question, "Why was Google unable to supply it's users with information regarding the incident 'World Trade Attack'?" Search Engineers were quick to point out the main defect of the webpages being uncrawlable.

(There are three main processes which support the search system: 

• Crawling :the analysis of web pages done by search engine bots,
•  Indexing : saving a copy of the crawled webpages on servers 
•  Caching : the storage of the server's file for reuse.) 

After locating the faults and failures within the search engine, the officials at Google started suggesting optimisation techniques to make the webpages more crawlable- all of which is categorised under the umbrella term 'on page seo'. 

(Page optimisation consists of on page and off page optimisation. On page refers to the optimisation of different parts of a website to increase search engine rankings while off page refers to the optimisations done outside the website to increase the ranking.)

For further improvement of the user-search engine relationship, the officials at Google suggested publicising a guideline which contained optimisation practices and be made available via  webmasters. But the decision was highly criticised and opposed by search engineers as optimisation files were kept a secret till then. Moreover, they were adamant that Google was bringing it's own downfall with this risky decision. For data to get maximised, you have to earn the trust of the users. Realising this , Google put out a 33 page pdf on SEO , regardless of the oppositions they heard. Webmasters started experimenting with their webpages after going through the guidelines and experienced the merits themselves. It got accepted by the masses and hence became a success.

Evolution of SEO

At first, Google's strategy for the ranking system was to focus on specific niche or keyword. The rank of the site depended on the number of times the specific keyword was repeated. Unfortunately , webmasters started misusing this by following an unethical practice called keyword stuffing. It is the process of repeating specific keywords unnecessarily to rank the site higher. By doing so , websites started climbing up the rank levels but they failed to reciprocate the desired quality. Keyword stuffing also falls under black hat seo techniques- which are highly discouraged and opposed. Fortunately the websites who underwent keyword stuffing immediately fell down rank without sustaining as Google reported them under spam.

Google then changed their algorithm to focus on meta tagging. Meta tags were mostly used to give extra information about the website. It didn't last long as webmasters started stuffing the tags with unnecessary words which ultimately led  to Google disposing the keyword system in September of 2009.

Google then shifted their focus on links. The criteria of ranking was dependent on the number of times a link was visited. Even then a loophole was found as website owners started selling their links to webmasters. They also went onto buying links from others to rank higher which led to poorer search results. Sites which ranked higher had poor quality.

The algorithm was again changed to be quality link specific. According to the new ranking system, sites can only top the ranking if they get  links from high quality sites. For this Google introduced a new method called PageRank which determined which websites were qualified as high quality. According to it, the lowest rank is zero while the highest rank is ten. 

Ads and AdSense

After becoming a reputed search engine , Google established an online advertisement program called Google Ads, where anyone could advertise their sites through Google- which proved to be a great help to people in the business industry. This feature became an instant hit with  Google skyrocketing , one of the main reason behind being how easily customisable the ads were. The users themselves can decide the specific audience to target their ads to, create their own ads and even schedule ads at specific locations and times.

Following the success of Google Ads , Google pulled out their new initiative called Google AdSense , a free way to earn revenue by displaying ads on sites. The ads displayed are related to the content of the site and website manners saw this as a potential money maker.

After 2008, Google became a large company ,acquiring YouTube and starting Gmail around the same time, earning them a grand audience. Google also tried personalising the search engine according to each user's requirements. The search engine rankings now rested on the most interactive website regardless of rank. This was in 2009.

2010 opened the way for a new shift in algorithm due to the emergence of social media. Witnessing how social media sites had great interactivity , Google changed their algorithm to concentrate on the factor if a site had it's own social media link as the ranking factor. It was even termed as social media signals but the change didn't hold on and became irrelevant  after every site opened up their own social media for boosting purposes. Moreover, it posed a problem at times when different sites had the same social media signals. At those times , the higher rank depended on influential power ,that is , whose social media was interacted by the more influential people.

Coming back to when Google was quality link specific , even with the additional feature of PageRank , the search engine still faced issues as High quality ranked sites began selling their link to low ranked sites- defeating the purpose of the algorithm. But as expected from professionals 'Google came up with a solution that is commonly known as passing the juice.

Passing the Juice

 

Link Juice is referred to the value or equity passed from on one page or site to others.

In this , if high ranked sites are caught selling many of their links to low rank files then the PageRank of the higher rated site will go down. Link juice is commonly passed through hyperlink < A href >.

Eventually the usage of PageRank came to a halt in 2019 but it is still used in algorithms.