Search Engine Optimization History

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 7:30 pm

Webmasters nowadays spend quite some time optimizing their websites for search engines. Books are written regarding search engine optimization and a few kind of industry has developed to offer search engine optimization services to potential clients. However where did this all begin? How did we tend to finish up with the SEO world we tend to live in nowadays (from a webmaster standpoint seen)?

A guy named Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, developed the primary search engine for the Web in 1990. This search engine was referred to as “Archie” and was designed to archive documents available on the Internet at that time. About a year later, Gopher, an alternate search engine to Archie, was developed at the University of Minnesota. These 2 kinda search engines triggered the birth of what we use as search engines today.

In 1993, Matthew Gray developed terribly first search engine robot – the World Wide Net Wanderer. However, it took till 1994 that search engines as we tend to know them these days were born. Lycos, Yahoo! And Galaxy were started and as you most likely – 2 of these are still around these days (2005).

In 1994 some companies started experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization. The emphasis was place solely on the submission method at that time. Within twelve months, the primary automated submission software packages were released. Of course it didn’t take long until the concept of spamming search engines was ‘invented’. Some webmasters quickly realized that they could swamp and manipulate search results pages by over-submission of their sites. However – the search engines soon fought back and modified things to forestall this from happen.

Soon, search engine optimizers and therefore the search engines started enjoying some sort of a “cat and mouse” game. Once a way to manipulate a research engine was discovered by the SE-optimizers they took advantage of this. The search engines subsequently revised and enhanced their ranking algorithms to retort to these strategies. It had been clear very soon that mainly a small cluster of webmasters was abusing the search engine algorithms to realize advantage over the competition. Black Hat search engine optimization was born. The unethical method of manipulating search engine resulted in faster responses from search engines. Search engines are attempting to stay the search results clean of SPAM to produce the best service to customers.

The search engine trade quickly realized that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as an trade would not go away, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would wish to at least settle for the industry. Search engines now partially work with the SEO industry however are still very desirous to type out SPAMMERS that are making an attempt to govern the results.

When Google.com started to be the search engine of alternative for additional than 50% of the Web users it was highly visible to anyone in the trade that search engine spamming had reached a new dimension. Google.com was therefore much more vital to the success of a website that many webmasters solely targeted on optimizing their sites for Google only because the payoff was value the efforts. Once more – Black Hat SEO occurred, pushing down the honest webmaster and their sites in search results delivered. Google started fighting back. Many major updates to Google’s algorithms forced all webmaster to adapt to new strategies. Black Hat SE-optimizers however suddenly saw something completely different happening. Instead of just being pushed down within the search results their websites were suddenly utterly faraway from the search index.

And then there was one thing referred to as the “Google Sandbox” to indicate up in discussions. Websites either disappeared into the sandbox or new websites never created it into the index and were considered in the Google Sandbox. The sandbox appeared to be the place where Google would ‘park’ websites either thought of SPAMMY or to not be conform with Google’s policies (duplicate websites below totally different domain names, etc.). The Google Sandbox thus so much has not been confirmed or denied by Google and many webmasters consider it to be myth.

In late 2004 Google announced to own 8 billion pages/sites within the search index. The gap between Google and the following two competitors (MSN and Yahoo!) seemed to grow. However – in 2005 MSN in addition to Yahoo! Started fighting back putting life back into the search engine war. MSN and Yahoo seemed to realize ground in delivering better and cleaner results compared to Google. In July of 2005 Yahoo! Announced to possess over 20 billion pages/sites in the search index – leaving Google way behind. Nobody search engine has won the war yet. The 3 major search engines however are eagerly fighting for market share and one mistake could change the fortune of a probe engine. It can be a rocky ride – however worth watching from the sidelines.

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